IT departments today are faced with the challenge of maintaining their current service desk solution and at the same time extending these capabilities to handle a more comprehensive set of IT Service Management (ITSM) requirements. Meanwhile, business sponsors, customers and partners are demanding new services and supporting infrastructure, which may exist in the form of virtual or cloud environments. This presents additional challenges for managing the extended infrastructure as well as providing a proven “best practice approach” to maintain a complete and thorough process and to mitigate the risk associated with embracing new service paradigms.
As IT decision makers discuss these issues, several key questions can emerge;
• Does our current service desk or ITSM solution provide us with the flexibility to manage new systems, services and assets?
• How do we extend our current best practices approach to encompass new areas such as cloud computing and new services delivered via SaaS (software-as-a-service)?
• Will we be able to manage all these various systems and services from “one pane of glass”?
When organizations move to embrace services and solutions delivered via SaaS, or cloud based infrastructures they normally encounter new management challenges for those specific services such as how do we measure the technical effectiveness of the new service, how do we report the cost advantages to the business, and how do we integrate those services with data, applications, infrastructure components that are still located on premise. And when it comes to support, how do we integrate the new SaaS / cloud solutions into our core IT service management functions such as Incident & Problem Management, Change & Release Management, Asset, Configuration and Inventory Management? Without this integration, many organizations are concerned that they may lose the holistic “life-cycle” control they have established and revert back to fragmented management covering only part of the IT operation.
Meeting these evolutionary needs for SaaS and Cloud based ITSM services, BMC Software is assisting companies all over the world and in diverse industries such as healthcare, education, government, financial services and many more, by providing a full featured IT Service Management portfolio that makes handling the day to day tasks of service support more productive while at the same time providing the flexibility and visibility to manage a wider and dispersed IT infrastructure. These solutions squarely satisfy the tactical daily support and request requirements – AND – they provide the capabilities to satisfy a firms longer term strategic needs. BMC Software’s SaaS-based ITSM solutions are built on a common and integrated platform to allow the growth to additional capabilities to achieve the vision of true Business Service Management. BMC is helping companies begin this process with our IT Service Management Solution Planning Process and Organizational Alignment workshops.