As the demand for cloud services continues to increase, CIOs are looking for technologies that can better automate and better manage operational processes.
In this case, a company wants to use its position as an ITSM expert: ServiceNow. Recently, the company chose to double the number of tools dedicated to IT operations management.
“They didn’t fully turn to IT operations because it is not necessary,” said Sanjay Medvitz, an analyst at Technology Business Research (TBR). “This is more a logical expansion, because IT Operations Management (ITOM) is still closely related to its ITSM business. This allows them to find new users.”
ServiceWatch Suite is the core of this strategy. The kit comes from the acquisition of Neebula Systems for US$100 million in 2014 and includes a configuration management database (CMDB), which can gather data related to multiple IT resources. The solution also considers change management and provides a service catalog.
ServiceNow Marketing Director Kevin Murray said the tool allows different business services to be modeled on the company’s specific infrastructure. What many CIOs lack. “There is a major problem: Put the correct information in the CMDB, but there is no related service. He just said that this is just a series of data. “But by putting the service mapping in the CMDB, we can know which part of the infrastructure Which service is associated with, such as human resource system, accounting or CRM. “
ServiceNow achieved a turnover of US$1 billion in 2015 and has set itself a goal of reaching US$4 billion by 2020. Therefore, IT operations management solutions will have to vigorously promote the development of the company. Reach this level.
ITSM accounted for approximately 70% of the group’s total revenue in 2015, but ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman predicts that this share will rise to 50% by 2020. By then, ITOM in this field should account for a large part of turnover.
Is it too expensive?
Some users find that the price of ServiceNow modules (at least for some modules) is too expensive, so they decide to keep their own internal solution, which can sometimes be associated with a series of contracted providers. “We evaluated some of the service desk operations of its ITSM service, but it was beyond our budget,” assured us an IT manager of a large American company. “Our needs are strategic, and its platform is undoubtedly a good choice.”
However, other users think it is worth the effort and the price, because the advanced automation features and convenience make it unnecessary to worry about implementation details and maintenance of such services.
“Their ability to surpass ITSM is unique,” said Brad Paubel, vice president of Maritz. “This is beyond the boundaries of change and incident management, and is the foundation of a system.”
However, for other users who compare ServiceNow with more traditional service desk solutions, pricing is still complicated, but in most cases, this may be worth the investment. Bart Murphy, CTO of York Risk Services Group, said: “But it’s not exactly the same comparison.” “You need to think of ServiceNow more as an enterprise platform and estimate how many systems it can integrate with. It’s the help desk. Good tool, but it can also be replaced or integrated with other systems.”
Help Desk IT
A few years ago, the ServiceNow platform was formed, when the team developed an IT service management application to automate repetitive service desk tasks, such as submitting an incident ticket, assigning it to a dedicated team, and monitoring problem solutions. Kevin Murray commented that its basic goal is to create a tool that can replace the old ITSM native application.
The application has won enough IT departments for ServiceNow to continue its momentum. The application injects infrastructure-related information into the Cloud CMDB, which powers the IT service management application.
In the past year, company officials have repeatedly emphasized that ServiceNow is now a platform-driven company. Claiming that they are far beyond the scope of the service desk. They believe that the platform can better host ITSM products and provide a simple way to integrate brand operation management tools and third-party tools.
If this strategy yields results to a large extent—especially when competition is composed of smaller help desk participants—it may eventually push the group into a larger land where competition is fierce.
“They want everyone to know that they have a platform; for example, this will make them stand out from the new competitors in Salesforce or IBM,” commented Sanjay Madvitz (TBR).
Translated and adapted by editors
#ITSM #operation #management
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