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The Compass: the EU's Right to Repair Directive lands, DaaS gets a second look, and the HBOM is a real document now
Published
Weekly Roundup · April 20, 2026 · 6 min read
One trend, a few category notes, three reads, one thing to do before the end of the week. That's the Compass, weekly.
This week: the EU's Right to Repair Directive is no longer hypothetical, Device-as-a-Service is getting a second look from teams who dismissed it two years ago, and a concept from the software world — the bill of materials — has a real published framework on the hardware side. Let's get into it.
The trend: right-to-repair is closer than most ITAM teams think
The headline: the EU's Right to Repair Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1799) was adopted in June 2024, entered force on July 30, 2024, and member states must transpose it by July 31, 2026. Among other things, it requires manufacturers of in-scope products to offer repair within reasonable time and price — including outside the legal guarantee period — and to keep parts and repair information available for years after sale.
Two important qualifications. First, the directive's product scope is specific: phones, tablets, servers, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, and TVs are explicitly in scope. Laptops, as of the adopted directive, are not. Second, on the US side, repair legislation is real but narrower than headlines suggest. Per PIRG's tracker, a small number of states (California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, Oregon) have passed consumer-electronics repair laws. Among them, Minnesota is the only state whose statute meaningfully extends to enterprise computing equipment; New York and Oregon explicitly exclude B2B/government.
So the right framing isn't "repair laws now cover your fleet." The right framing is: the regulatory direction is toward longer-supported, more-repairable hardware, and that direction changes the lifecycle math whether or not your specific devices are in current scope.
// The math (illustrative, not survey data)
Take a 50-person company on a 3-year laptop refresh. Stretch the cycle by a year for the fleet you can stretch — battery and thermal-paste candidates only, not the units that are visibly worn. Even a partial cycle stretch defers a chunk of next year's CapEx. The numbers depend entirely on your fleet condition, your replacement spec, and your refresh cadence. The point isn't a specific dollar figure — it's that the option exists, and most teams haven't priced it.
The catch: you need to know which devices are realistic candidates for life-extension. That means tracking condition, warranty status, repair history, and age in one place — not across three spreadsheets and a ticketing system. This is the kind of question a system of record answers in thirty seconds and a spreadsheet answers in an afternoon.
In the ITAM category this week
A few category notes:
| Vendor | What we're seeing | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Oomnitza | Continuing to position itself as the Enterprise Technology Management (ETM) category — ITAM + HR + finance + security in one lifecycle. | The interesting bet here is that ITAM alone isn't a category anymore — it's a feature inside a broader lifecycle platform. Whether the market agrees is still an open question, but the framing is at least consistent. |
| ServiceNow | HAM Pro pricing remains a meaningful barrier for mid-market teams. | ServiceNow is the best ITAM platform money can buy. The problem is the money. If you're under 500 seats, you're subsidizing enterprise features you'll never touch. |
| Ivanti | Still shipping ITAM features, still working through the brand consequences of the past few years of CVE coverage. | Selling an asset management platform is harder when your own attack surface keeps making the news. The product isn't the problem — the brand baggage is. |
| Freshservice | ITAM module continues to thicken — auto-discovery, contract management, and a respectable API. | Freshworks is quietly building the mid-market bundle that ServiceNow prices people out of. The risk is the same as every bundle play: depth suffers when you're building five things at once. |
| assetcompass | Shipped condition tracking and repair-history fields — the building blocks for the lifecycle-extension workflow above. | Our bet: if your team is under 200 people, you don't need a platform. You need a system of record that's fast enough that people actually use it. Everything else follows from adoption. |
The broader pattern hasn't changed from last week: the independent ITAM layer is getting squeezed between discovery tools growing up and RMM/ITSM platforms growing sideways. The vendors that survive are the ones who pick a lane and own it. Ours is the small-team system of record. We're not trying to be ServiceNow. We're trying to be the tool you open on Monday morning and actually enjoy using.
Three reads worth your time this week
- European Commission — the official page on the Right to Repair Directive. The actual text and FAQ. If your fleet touches the EU at all, it's worth reading the scope and timeline yourself rather than relying on summaries (including ours). The product list and the July 31, 2026 transposition deadline are the two things to anchor on.
- Dell — "Named a Leader in the 2025 IDC DaaS MarketScape." Vendor-published, but the underlying IDC framing is genuine: Device-as-a-Service is no longer enterprise-only. The mid-market case is real, especially given the hardware-cost pressure we covered last week. If your CFO is asking about OpEx models, this category is worth understanding before the conversation, not during it.
- CISA — "A Hardware Bill of Materials (HBOM) Framework for Supply Chain Risk Management." Published by CISA's ICT Supply Chain Risk Management Task Force in September 2023. It's the canonical document on what an HBOM is and how to use one. Worth reading even if you're not in a regulated sector — procurement requirements cascade, and the questions federal contractors are answering today are the questions vendor questionnaires will be asking mid-market companies in a few years.
A thing to watch: the Hardware Bill of Materials
You've heard of SBOMs — Software Bills of Materials. They're now table stakes for federal procurement and increasingly expected in enterprise vendor assessments. The concept is migrating to hardware.
The Hardware Bill of Materials (HBOM) is exactly what it sounds like: a structured inventory of every component in a device — chipsets, firmware, country of origin, supplier chain. CISA's framework (linked above) is the canonical reference. Adoption today is mostly federal and defense-adjacent procurement; broader mid-market traction will follow on the timeline that vendor-questionnaire requirements always do — slowly, then all at once.
Why should a 50-person company care? Because procurement requirements cascade. What's mandatory for federal contractors today is a vendor questionnaire for mid-market companies in a few years. If your asset records can answer "where did this device come from, and what's in it?" you're ahead. If they can't yet answer "how many laptops do we have?" — well, that's the better place to start.
Field test: the depreciation reality check
If the right-to-repair framing above resonated, here's a practical exercise that pays for itself at the next budget review. The numbers in your version of this will be specific to your fleet.
- Pull your current depreciation schedule. Most teams default to 3 years straight-line for laptops, 5 for desktops and monitors. Check whether that still matches how long devices actually stay in service. If your average laptop tenure is meaningfully longer than your write-down period, you're over-depreciating and under-reporting fleet value.
- Flag devices past their depreciation date that are still deployed. These are "zero-value" assets on the books that are doing real work. Finance sees a fully depreciated asset. IT sees a machine that's one spilled coffee away from a fire drill. Both views matter — and neither team usually sees the other's.
- Count your repair-eligible fleet. Devices in the 2.5-to-4 year range with condition rated "Good" or "Fair" are your life-extension pool. Battery and thermal-paste swaps on a 3-year-old business laptop are measured in low-hundreds-of-dollars per device; replacements are measured in thousands. The relative-cost gap is wider than most teams have priced.
- Bring one number to your next finance sync. "We have X devices that are fully depreciated but still in production." That sentence starts a conversation about asset lifecycle strategy. Without it, you're just asking for budget.
This is the kind of analysis that takes an afternoon in a spreadsheet and five minutes in a purpose-built tool. We're biased, obviously, but the point isn't which tool — it's that the data should be queryable, not archaeologically excavated from a shared drive.
Housekeeping
Last week's piece on hardware pricing pressure got more replies than we expected, mostly from teams asking about the battery-swap-vs-replace analysis. We're working on a standalone piece with a calculator — should be out in the next couple of weeks. If you want early access, start a free trial and we'll send it your way.
Also: if you're evaluating ITAM tools right now and want a no-nonsense comparison of what's out there for teams under 200 people, our guide to free ITAM software and the Snipe-IT comparison are the two most-read pieces on this blog. They're opinionated, but they're honest.
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