IT Service

Management

Who
Are your Top Software Providers And

Why
You should consider them

ABOUT US
In todays world, companies are facing pressure to adapt their businesses for the mobile revolution, cloud computing, Social Media marketing, virtualization and much more. The companies that can use these shifts in technology as an advantage stand to benefit greatly against their competition and even grow to serve new industries. In order to be successful, a company must employ the proper balance of strategy, process, tools and support and in most cases; they need a partner to lead them in the right directions. Advanced MarketPlace employs proven methodologies and partners with world class organizations to deliver value to our clients. We work with customers to plan, architect, implement, and manage solutions put them on the path to success and help ensure they stay on that path. Our company is headquartered in Tampa, FL with sales offices throughout the US. Technical Consultants are located throughout the US and can be deployed world-wide. With over 16 years in business and hundreds of years of combined Consulting, Project Management, Training and Support experience, our reputation within the industry is impeccable. We service all industry segments including commercial, Federal government, state/local government and education. Adv

What is ITSM ?
What is ITSM?
In todays 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 employees 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 theyre used. Amazingly, few organizations can admit to having a firm grip on this simple requirement. Asset registry systems dont 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 theres 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. 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.

Why ITSM & Benefits ?

Why ITSM & Benefits?
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is gaining increasing importance across todays enterprise. Why? Because its 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 organizations 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. A good IT Service Management solution will help you automate routine processes, run IT like a business, establishing clear baselines for measuring performance and determining whether youre meeting business goals and customer requirements. A comprehensive ITSM methodology that includes assessing the overall maturity of your ITSM function, developing an ITSM strategy blueprint, and validating current processes can yield tremendous benefits to your organization.

Why ITSM & Benefits ?

Why ITSM & Benefits?
Once its in place, ITSM helps align higher-quality, cost-effective IT services more closely with overall business needs. Failing to align IT services with business needs decreases the productivity of IT staff and internal users, disrupts key revenuegenerating applications such as transaction processing or e-commerce, and ultimately diminishes the customer experience. Businesses ignore the importance of a sound ITSM strategy at their own peril!

What Should I Consider When Evaluating ITSM Software?

Before you take a look at a new tool, or identify where your current tool is limiting your effectiveness, its crucial to really understand the various processes that your organization is adopting and pinpoint areas of weakness. As an example, suppose the Finance department is generating an inordinate number of incidents pertaining to the corporate ERP system. Upon further research you determine that ad-hoc changes to the business intelligence application are happening too often, and the majority of these changes are being rolled back due to poor planning and execution. With constant demands for changes to critical business systems, its getting more and more critical that you put in some proper change management processes. On top of this, IT management is saying that the problem resolution reports dont include relevent metrics. Furthermore, the service desk team is complaining that the user interface makes keying in data a cumbersome and time-consuming process. And, without any automation, performing tasks like incident routing and escalation are a manual process that just isnt working. As you evaluate these challenges, its important to rank them in order of business impact, attempting to quantify the annual cost and lost productivity or revenue associated with each. In this hypothetical example, the IT team decides its first priority is to gain a handle on infrastructure changes. Since it doesnt have standardized Change processes or a Change Management application, it begins a vendor search.

Why ITSM & Benefits ?

The IT Director begins by calling a friend that works for a niche Change Management vendor. Upon further analysis, the director realizes that although this solution meets his base level requirements to better track and manage the change management process to his infrastructure, integration into his existing service desk solution will be costly. Without an integrated solution, he would not be able to associate a change to the IT asset in his Inventory Management database. He wouldnt be able to easily determine how many incidents and changes were associated to a particular asset class. And his service desk team would not be able to easily generate a Request for Change from a Problem record. With this solution, he could not solve all of his other related IT problems and would be looking for another module from another vendor down the road. You need a complete ITSM solution . One that has a full set of ITIL modules to manage the full incident through resolution lifecycle without the high cost of integration between multi-vendor solutions. Furthermore, unless you have in-house ITIL expertise and resources assigned to develop your best practices business processes, you should choose a vendor that will also become a business partner . helping you design and build in best-practices processes based on ITIL. When considering an ITSM software, here are things to consider right at the outset: Is the software scalable? Is the software user interface role-based and easily configured to support different user group perspectives? Is the software extensible to integrate with other core rd party applications? Is the software customizable? Or must the vendors come in every time a small tweak is required? Does the software include business process automation that has drag and drop tools, wizards, debugging tools and reusable process libraries? Does the vendor have a robust portfolio of ITIL-compliant modules and include additional solutions that extend beyond core help desk functions such as Software Asset Management, Client Lifecycle Management, and Voice Self Service?

Features of ITSM ?
Once youre committed to going down the path to identify and implement an ITSM solution in your business, there are essential features to keep in mind. There are certain core ITSM capabilities that will allow your organization to meet the growing demands of todays IT-based business requirements. The main ones include: Incident Management, including help desk best practices to easily categorize issues and automate workflow. A real-time, customizable dashboard capability is often builtin to the product.

Problem Management, including processes for root-cause analysis that will help you minimize the impact of problems.

Change Management, to ensure that you have and can manage standards and procedures for making changes and supporting your customers.

Release Management, allowing you to design and implement procedures to distribute releases and communicate changes with your IT staff and customers.

Availability Management, including a real-time dashboard to provide information on configuration and services availability.

Configuration Management, helps you identify configuration items and provides reports on requests for change (RFCs). Ideally, you should be able to view the status of IT assets and their relationship to incidents in real-time.

Service Level Management, which allows you to maintain and improve IT services through agreements with your customers. You also should have the ability to define and manage service catalogs.

Self Service Management, allows your customers to view the status of their issues and submit new issues over the Web. This improves the overall operation of the service management department and enhances customer service.

Knowledge Management, provides an important capability to your IT support staff and your customers. Support staff will be able to take advantage of solutions that are known to solve issues without researching them each time. Your customers should also be able to search for solutions over the web, which will reduce calls to the IT.

What to look for when choosing ITSM ?

Today there is a whole new generation of software products that deliver the critical IT value that companies are looking for. Many have been purpose built to deliver the capabilities required to operate as a service provider integrated into the enterprise or mission value chain. Some of the larger software companies have banded together to establish a configuration management database (CMDB) standard that will enable various point solutions to be integrated into this evolving ITSM software architecture. But, are they right for YOU? Here are some time-tested, easy-to-follow steps when selecting ITSM software solutions. Analyze Your Needs While this may seem obvious at first, experts say theyve lost count of the number of IT shops theyve worked with over the years that started with a product search as opposed to a clearly defined need. This normally goes hand-in-hand with doing ITIL without understanding their current capability or a desired end-state of the ITSM processes in mind. A needs analysis is fundamental, and addresses the definition of the goals and objectives to be achieved as the result of acquiring new software. Its critical that any needs analysis should be conducted in parallel with an IT Service Management process maturity assessment. Specify Your Requirements Specifying requirements means more than just writing down selected features from the vendors marketing material. Your requirements are your requirements and should reflect what the product must do to enable the process that you either have or wish to have. Among the deliverables of your process design or redesign phase of a process implementation program should be a requirements definition. Identify Suppliers Before you start looking for suppliers, your organization should determine its appetite for risk. Factors to consider include your current vendor (if you have one), ability to integrate products from several vendors vs. a single-vendor product suite. Its important to remember: Some assembly is required. The scope of that assembly is where risks need to be assessed.

What to look for when choosing ITSM ?

The industry is moving away from integrating best of breed point solutions obtained from a set of different vendors. In todays risk adverse environment, it is more costeffective in the long term to select a vendor that has a breadth of offering to support your long term roadmap. And, if you have an aggressive maturity path, you will want to consider vendor size, longevity in the industry, and financial strength, which is an indicator of its ability to continue to build or buy new modules to stay ahead of your long term requirements. Vendor consolidation in the technology sector is a current trend, and you will be better suited working with a vendor that is not going to go through a challenging acquisition which could derail their customer focus. If you want a one-size fitsall solution, then your risks are associated with product limitations (best practices are defined by the vendors product limitations). Do Your Own Research The due diligence you put into reseach will directly impact the quality of your product decision. There is no substitute for hands-on research. It is also valuable to understand each vendors thought leadership expertise. So, do some research and understand the ITSM vendor landscape so that you can make an informed decision. Kick the Tires If a test drive of an ITSM solution is possible, thats great. This is where you get into some level of detail in the actual evaluation of the product. If you have a detailed requirements list, you can drill down to the necessary level of detail to determine the products actual capability to meet your requirements. You should be able to clearly identify what works the way you want it to work, and what can be configured to work the way you want it to work. Bottom line: Selecting the right ITSM solution for your business is up to you, not the software companies, to do the work necessary to understand your needs, articulate your requirements, understand your appetite for risk, qualify prospective vendors, validate the products capability to meet your requirements, and validate your selection/ recommendation with others in the IT Service Management practitioner community.

Who to consider when choosing ITSM ?

Top ITSM Vendors to consider You have many options when choosing a ITSM solution. To make it a bit easier, weve featured some of the leading IT Service Management solutions in this paper. Review these vendors, and youll be well on the way to finding the right ITSM software for your business.

BMC Software Computer Associates (CA) Dell (Kace) EMC (Infra) Front Range IBM Landesk Sunview Software Tech Excel

About BMC
Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software
Business runs better when IT runs at its best. Thats why more than 2 ,000 IT organizations from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industrys broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk, and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended December 1, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.

BMC remedy IT Service Management Suite

The BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite is a unified, ITIL-certified service support suite that offers fully integrated mobility, service request, identity, and knowledge management applications to provide self-service capabilities that enable increased operational efficiency and improved customer service quality. Available as mobile applications, BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite removes complexity and costs, while also providing visibility into the resources, activities, and priorities required to deliver and support business services. BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite includes the following industry-leading applications:

BMC Remedy Service Desk reduces the number of incidents handled, improves resolution times, and prevents future incidents from occurring. BMC Remedy Change and Release Management - delivers comprehensive policy, process management, and planning capabilities that help you increase the speed and consistency with which you implement changes, while also minimizing business risk and disruption. BMC Remedy Asset Configuration Management - helps drive down IT costs, while also improving service quality and compliance, with a comprehensive approach to :

About BMC

IT asset lifecycle management. BMC Mobile IT Service Management Applications manages incidents, approves change requests and updates asset information all from smartphones and tablets BMC Remedy Knowledge Management - provides framework for creating, publishing, reviewing, and searching knowledge articles BMC Remedy Service Request Management - allows IT and other service provider organizations (like HR and facilities) to define services, publish them in a service catalog, and automate the request and fulfillment via a service request portal.

BMC Footprints
BMC FootPrints is a flexible, comprehensive, integrated IT service and asset management solution that is easy to install, use and extend to create business value. Supporting the convergence of IT service and asset management, this powerful platform gives you the visibility and control you need to continuously improve service delivery and manage IT assets while driving efficiencies, controlling costs, maintaining compliance and reducing IT vulnerability and financial risk. With an emphatic focus on user experience, FootPrints improves customer satisfaction and IT productivity revealing the true value of IT service & support to the business. BMC FootPrints modular design enables you to adopt IT service and asset management capabilities at a pace that works for your business. Leverage BMC FootPrints to:

Gain control of the wide variety of work that happens in a resource constrained IT organization Simplify and automate routine tasks that commonly consume human and financial resources

About BMC

Reduce calls by enabling users to self-resolve common issues and defer nonurgent issues Document, record and centralize work for future reference and to demonstrate compliance Prevent future issues by controlling and managing change and configuration Save time and money by understanding financial and business implications of decisions. Gain visibility into the landscape of the IT asset environment BMC remedyforce Service desk

BMC Remedyforce Service Desk is a cloud-based, next-generation service desk solution that represents a cost-effective, contemporary, and easy-to-use response to the challenges of delivering high-quality service support with no capital investment, no infrastructure upgrades, and no software maintenance required. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk enables you to exceed expectations and deliver interactive IT support services accessible anywhere, anytime. Remedyforce allows the IT organization to operate through built-in best practices across key ITIL service management processes for greater control and efficiency. With BMC Remedyforce Service Desk, you will:

Deliver a comprehensive and modern self-service experience to users, while also increasing efficiency amongst knowledge workers Empower support teams with real-time social collaboration and knowledge management Monitor and enforce service level agreements between the business, IT, and third parties Reduce training and accelerate productivity with a simple and intuitive user experience

About BMC

Keep pace with innovation and emerging best practices through seamless SaaS delivery

Through a range of pre-built, best-practice workflows, you can:

Eliminate up to half of your inquiries and maximize agent productivity with comprehensive end-user self service Reduce the risk and cost of unplanned changes with advanced scheduling, including planned outages and automated approval process Minimize the number of incidents generated by problems through effective root cause analysis and knowledge creation Provide decision support to your agents with access to configuration management information and full visibility between processes and teams BMC Track-It!

BMC Track-It! is the industry leading IT help desk and asset management solution for small to medium sized businesses. Providing a comprehensive view of your IT environment, out of the box, Track-It gives you the visibility and control you need to efficiently and securely manage your help desk and IT assets. With over 20 years of experience and 0,000 customers across the globe, Track-It empowers you to quickly and cost-effectively streamline your help desk and IT asset management needs from a single, intuitive console. BMC Track-It! included core modules for Help Desk Management, Inventory and Asset Management, Problem and Incident Management, Change Management, Purchasing, Software License Management, Training, Library, Facilities Management, Self Service/ Password Reset web portal for end users, Mobile and Web Help Desk interface for technicians, a data warehouse driven Dashboard for metrics and Reporting. Additional modules available for purchase include remote control, barcoding, migration and survey management.

About BMC
BMC Track-It!:

Dramatically reduces time spent on managing and scheduling repetitive tasks Increases users confidence when placing a request with your help desk staff

Knowledge base solutions, 24/7 self-service for request submission and online status checks available within the 100% web-based self-service portal

Ensures that requests will be addressed in a timely fashion with Service Level Agreements Improves change management control and efficiency by properly managing change requests while encouraging teamwork and collaboration with Track-It!

For More information: Jason Gluck jgluck@[email protected] 813-655-7173