2009 Top 10 IT Service Management (ITSM) Vendor Report - Independent Research

Top 10 ITSM Vendors Revealed
2009
Profiles of the Leading IT Service Management
Technology Vendors
Find the best ITSM solution for your IT department.About ITSM Software
In today's highly competitive business climate, the role of technology in most enterprises underpins their success. An unexpected failure of a business critical server, or even an employee's laptop computer or mobile device, can significantly impact employee productivity - and bottom line revenue. Quickly responding to employee service requests and proactively managing the IT infrastructure has become an increasingly important IT function, yet most organizations struggle with a limited IT Service Management (ITSM) toolset.
A fundamental requirement for reducing cost and improving quality of your IT service begins with controlling the number of incidents received and reducing the time it takes to successfully resolve these incidents. An increase in incidents can be attributed to complexity of the IT infrastructure.
Lack of infrastructure visibility and an increasing number of infrastructure changes are creating IT havoc. The service desk must be able to easily ascertain what assets they have, where they are and how they're used. Amazingly, few organizations can admit to having a firm grip on this simple requirement.
Asset registry systems don't deliver sufficient capability to capture the complex relationships between infrastructure components, and attempting to build an in-house Configuration Management Database has proven to be an unsuccessful undertaking. And then there's the question of associating service incidents with a problem record, identifying known errors and root cause, ensuring that incidents and problems are resolved in a timely manner, scheduling and tracking necessary infrastructure changes, and validating that the IT infrastructure is updated to reflect these changes.
Every department these days is being forced to consider new areas of optimization, and IT is no exception. Not only will IT want to expand its ITSM toolset to introduce more automation and optimization, but it will want to consider lower cost service delivery channels such as Web and voice self service.
© 2009, IT-Software.com. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction Prohibited. About ITSM Software
Finding the right tools to support the end-to-end service lifecycle described above can be challenging and expensive. But with the right preparation, and armed with the best information, you can successfully identify and implement the right solution for your organization.
What is ITSM?Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is gaining increasing importance across today's enterprise. Why? Because it's primarily concerned with keeping the satisfaction of the customer squarely in focus. The customer may be an employee with a technology challenge or an external customer with a customer service issue. ITSM is process-oriented, from the beginning to the end of the organization's product or service lifecycle.
And because ITSM is a process-focused solution designed to focus on the support needs of the customer, it has ties and common interests with key business process improvement movements and best practices industry practices, such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, and ITIL®. When the needs of the customer take first priority, the primary focus of ITSM is to provide a proven, effective framework to structure and align IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users.
ITSM has been traditionally concerned with providing "back office" support for employees regarding the hardware and software they rely on to perform their job function. For example, the computer systems and related software and network access required by the marketing staff must be accessible and functioning at a high performance level in order for this team to get their job done. All industries these days, but especially government, education, healthcare, financial, manufacturing, retail, and travel industries, have significant information technology systems which are mission or business critical to the success of the company on a daily basis, 24x7. In this respect, ITSM can be seen as something like an end-to-end, enterprise resource planning (ERP) discipline for IT.
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