I recently attended the 2009 IAITAM Annual Conference, Las Vegas style. And although I’m sure everyone was equally tired of the “What happens in Vegas …” response to just about any statement that could be taken two ways, the conference as a whole was great. It’s an event that impresses me more every year: solid attendance (even in today’s challenging economy), an increasingly well-educated technical community regarding overall IT asset management practices, a growing understanding of the value of ITAM beyond just compliance, and a really great venue for vendors, service providers, practitioners, and end users to get together to share their experiences.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Bringing Green Together” which provided a background not only for the environmentally “green” areas such as reuse and disposal, but also the financial “green” realized by being ITAM-efficient, both with respect to purchasing assets and how efficiently those assets are utilized. There were over three dozen presentations on everything from vendor management to tools to internal evangelism, along with a number of end-user and ITAM practitioner case studies. There were also several opportunities to get current on the state of the ISO ITAM standards (the 19770 series). An update on the “-2″ tagging standard (which became official just a couple of weeks ago) was presented by Steven Klos, and the “-3″ entitlements group (led by John Tomeny) used the conference as an opportunity to convene its members and keep plugging away at it.

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