Alvin Park is a managing vice president in Gartner Research, responsible for the IT asset management and procurement function within the ITL Architecture/IT Business Roles group. In addition to general topics relating to information technology asset management, this coverage area encompasses the life cycle asset management of hardware and software from requisition to retirement, including procurement, deployment, maintenance and disposal. A major subset of this coverage area is software, where his team assists clients with pricing analysis, contract review and negotiating strategies for many of the large software vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, BMC, CA and more. In his previous research analyst role at Gartner, Mr. Park was responsible for software asset management of distributed and desktop computing. He has expertise on software licensing terms and conditions, pricing structures, license management, and contract negotiations. Mr. Park frequently consulted with vendors regarding their software licensing and pricing practices, as well as with enterprises that were negotiating agreements Microsoft.