‘Honestly, the visibility gap is what drove this. Many teams can get data, it’s painful, but they can get it. The problem is the second they get it, it starts aging. If your hardware inventory, your software licenses, your warranty tracking data isn’t staying up to date in real time across managed and unmanaged assets, you can’t make good decisions. We felt the only way to solve that properly was to build it right into the platform,’ says Josh Schofield, director of product management at NinjaOne.
NinjaOne’s Josh Schofield said the biggest pain point he hears from partners is about visibility.
“They’re tired of what they call ‘frankenstack’ solutions: exporting data out of one tool, pushing it into another, trying to mash APIs together,” Schofield, director of product management at Austin, Texas-based NinjaOne, told CRN. “It’s complicated, and by the time they get the data into a spreadsheet somewhere, it’s already out of date.”
To address that gap, the vendor rolled out NinjaOne IT Asset Management (ITAM), a new solution built directly into its platform giving complete visibility and control across environments, from managed endpoints, unmanaged and offline assets.
The idea behind it was to stop forcing teams to stitch together data from a patchwork of tools. And rather than build ITAM as an add-on or rely on an integration partner, NinjaOne developed it natively inside its existing platform. That decision, Schofield said, came directly from customer frustration.
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“Honestly, the visibility gap is what drove this,” he said. “Many teams can get data, it’s painful, but they can get it. The problem is the second they get it, it starts aging. If your hardware inventory, your software licenses, your warranty tracking data isn’t staying up to date in real time across managed and unmanaged assets, you can’t make good decisions. We felt the only way to solve that properly was to build it right into the platform.”
He pointed to employee offboarding as a common pain point.
“Think about any job you’ve ever left,” he said. “You had a laptop. You had software licenses assigned to you. A lot of people are remote now. If the IT team doesn’t trust their asset data, how do they know what to get back? That’s just one use case, but it all comes back to visibility, knowing where your connected and unconnected assets are and keeping that data current. That has a direct impact on the bottom line.”
The new ITAM capabilities also expand NinjaOne’s broader roadmap. By building IT asset management directly into the platform, the company is expanding and enriching existing visibility with warranty tracking, license management and deeper device-level data.
Security is another major theme as complete asset visibility translates into stronger security outcomes.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t manage it. And if you can’t manage it, you don’t know where the vulnerabilities are,” he said. “When you have high-quality data across all asset types with clear reporting, you can ensure everything is patched and updated. You can remove devices that are just sitting on the network and shouldn’t be there. That reduces hidden risk.”
NinjaOne partner Michael Cervino said adding native asset management directly into the company’s platform solves a real pain point for MSPs and IT teams.
“You can’t secure or optimize what you can’t see,” Cervino, co-founder and CEO of Radnor, Pa.-based Circle Square Consulting, told CRN. “NinjaOne closes the gap between knowing what endpoints you’re actively managing and actually understanding everything that’s living in a client’s environment. That kind of unified visibility is where the industry needs to go.”
Looking ahead, NinjaOne plans to deepen discovery capabilities and expand automation tied to asset data. The goal is to let asset intelligence drive more workflows, configuration capabilities and operational efficiencies inside the platform.
“Visibility is paramount,” he said. “Our customers told us they weren’t getting it the way they needed. So we brought IT asset management into a consolidated experience, paired with the workflows and simplicity we’re known for. For us, it all starts there.”
