Service Management is Coming of Age

A View from the Top by Jamal Labed, COO Staff&Line

The service management market is a mature, well established sector and spans back at least 20 years during which time it has evolved quite considerably. This is perfectly illustrated by the latest global trend which has recently gathered pace and that is the implementation of ITIL, the best practice framework. Today ITIL is very closely linked with service management, especially since the launch of ITIL v3.

It is interesting because ITIL was practically unknown three of four years ago, whereas today, everyone is not only talking about it, but we can see across our customer database that most, if not all are implementing a vast number of ITIL best practices. This demonstrates how much the market has matured, because implementing best practice and automating operational processes is a key indicator that a market is coming of age. Organisations are not only focused on ITIL but other industry standards such as ISO20000 and ensuring compliance. For many of the companies that we talk to this is extremely important and is well understood by senior management – a remarkable sea change in just a few years.

Historically service management was divided into two key areas: incidents and problems or 'trouble tickets' and IT asset management. From day one, Staff&Line really understood that in order to deliver good quality service you needed to know what assets you have in your infrastructure. As the market has evolved, so organisations have become more concerned, not only with trouble ticketing, but also with managing change. In order to deliver effective change management you need to understand your IT estate and so the whole asset lifecycle becomes even more pertinent. For example, if the service desk has a request to either upgrade or add new software, you need asset management capabilities in order to fulfil this request. Doing IT asset management or IT service management in silos makes no sense.

By talking to our clients, we anticipated this very early on and understood that this was not one single issue but two which go hand in hand. This is what we decided our strategy would be from the introduction of our very first product. Additionally, we are laser focused on the IT management market, unlike many of our competitors who deliver a broad range of products. Yes we are smaller than some of the other vendors but we have been single minded and a 'pure play' IT management company, and as a result we have accumulated over 20 years of experience gleaned from over 3,000 global customers.

And finally, we see huge changes afoot and a real revolution as the barriers between software and services come down and more of our customers demand Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). As the market matures so customers understand that they need something different from their software providers. This is not just a matter of renting versus buying. Customers want to outsource the entire administration of the tool and focus on their core competencies. This is not a fad but a real steep change in that it alters everything. It will be challenging for many of the software vendors who, let's face it, have effectively 'taken the money and run' and are not used to delivering the level of service that SaaS customers demand. There will be interesting times ahead. Top of our agenda is to make the management of IT as easy as possible. Whether this is through SaaS or our on-premise version, EasyVista has been designed with ease of use, transparency, value and simplicity in mind. I'm looking forward to the explosion of SaaS – after all, we've been doing SaaS for over ten years, so I know we're ready for it!