Enterprise datacenters are not any longer the one place to go for computing assets; they are the pivot of a choice of on-demand internal and external clouds or collocation facilities that an enterprise taps. If this seems too complicated, virtualization makes it simple by providing a single view of the physical resources on a screen. With drag and drop commands, the enterprise can call in on-demand computing resources when surges in traffic overwhelm the datacenter. All this sounds cool till you find out that the data on the physical assets in the virtualized environment is often incomplete or not descriptive enough of the business ownership, the life of the asset, etc.  You rummage through several spreadsheets and databases to painstakingly find the data you need. This one chink could well defeat the goal of quickly finding the resources you need when you need them. A virtual IT asset management solution automates the collation of data on the hardware and the software available in the virtualized environment. In a perfect world, enterprises would rather wash their hands off the messy business of managing datacenters. The reality is that the treasure trove of consumer and financial information or intellectual property is something enterprises want to zealously guard within their own datacenter. They need to redirect non-critical data to the cloud when they experience traffic spikes. There are also instances when companies want services but don’t want to invest capital resources to get them. As their assets are spread out over several locations and cloud vendors, it is harder to know what is available where and in what form. Traffic can shoot up during a market promotion, consumer buying during holiday seasons or something quirky like a victory of a sports team. Sony Entertainment was caught off-guard when demand surged for Michael Jackson’s music following his unexpected death. The surge in traffic could have been managed by letting customers browse the catalogue on a cloud service while reserving the enterprise datacenter for the purchases. Fear of losing control of critical data like customer information to cloud service providers is well founded in facts of recent history. The Linkup, an online storage services provider, closed down after it lost access to 45% of its customer information that was stored with Nirvanix, an online storage service company which shut down. Virtualization of data centers or the emergence of internal clouds is the foundation for their synchronization with external clouds. An effective inventory of Assets with appropriate offline market data associated with each piece of hardware and software inventory is a precondition for effectively leveraging the resources available in a virtualized network.