IBM Offers IT Service Desk Fix

IBM estimates that only 5 percent of service and support issues are resolved by self service, which makes the $1.2 billion IT service desk market (Gartner "Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk," Nov. 4, 2010) ripe for automation and integration products such as Big Blue's new cloud-based Tivoli Live -service manager. According to Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data, the IT service desk accounts for about 4 percent of the total IT budget, and since 86 percent of the cost of an IT service desk is staffing-related, that means about 3.9 percent of the total IT budget is spent on IT service desk staff.

While 100 percent automation won't happen, the company says that better than 5 percent can be achieved. Available on the IBM Cloud or as a stand-alone application, the scalable software-as-a-service solution can grow from basic IT service desk functionality to more advanced capabilities, including change and asset management.

The solution starts with as few as 25 help desk agents, scaling up to 500. The company believes that its rent, buy or mix-and-match approach to selling software for automating IT will make it easier for customers of all sizes to improve IT services while cutting costs.

One of the key benefits is that the subscription model for Tivoli Live-service manager moves this function from a capital to an operating expense, says IBM. Eliminating the challenges of perpetual software licenses, installed hardware, implementation costs and the time to implement just makes sense, says the company.

Tivoli Live-service manager joins IBM's first Tivoli Live SaaS offering, Tivoli Live - monitoring, which was announced a year ago. Both services can be used together with other IBM software, or they can be integrated for what Big Blue calls a broader service management environment.Included in the new offering are incident and problem management; IT asset management; service catalog, a portal for requesting standard IT and non-IT services; and change, configuration and release management. It also comes with 24-by-7 phone and e-mail support, as well as self-help content.

IBM joins a number of vendors that have been upgrading their capabilities in this segment, including Service-now.com, Dell Kace and ScriptLogic. According to the latest Gartner data, IT organizations are opting for IT service desk tools "based on ease of implementation, pricing flexibility and breadth of integrated IT service management tool offerings." Gartner's analysis of enterprise-class vendors found that most tools are largely commoditized, especially in incident management, where vendor functionality is 90 to 95 percent similar. So IBM's attempt to differentiate itself in this commodity market by addressing features like ease of implementation and licensing model flexibility falls in with Gartner's findings.

Gartner's top five trends shaping 2010, and into 2011, are tool acquisition and service desk business plans, SaaS versus on-premises life cycle licensing costs, process re-engineering projects, IT service support scope and a focus on integration.