Cherwell Product Demo
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
11:00AM ET / 8:00AM PT
Market Overview – IT Service Management Software
by, Eveline Oehrlich (Hubbert) with Peter O’Neill and Ben Echols
Executive Summary
The service desk market generated more than $1.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow at about 10%. This market segment has experienced very little innovation in the past few years. The goals of service desk customers are primarily to improve customer satisfaction and reduce service desk staffing costs. Both of these goals are reached through implementation of process improvements — or entirely new processes — that streamline the work for the service desk team. Additionally, pressure to justify costs drives the need for financial measures and data to prove the value of the service desk to the organization.
The market is filled with vendors that have all developed tools that look very similar. The fundamental processes of incident and problem management are comparable across these solutions, but ease of use and implementation time offer some differentiation.
Service desk requirements are changing as responsibility increases
2009 was a difficult year for IT operations professionals, as many organizations struggled in response to the downturn in the economy and many service desk technology projects were deferred or cancelled. Forrester sees this trend being reversed in 2010, with companies freeing up funds to improve facilities for their service desk groups that were either neglected or on hold for the past 12 to 18 months.
In past years, service desks only recorded and responded to user issues that arose in the environment, and service desk analysts have now become proficient in managing this responsibility. In the meantime though, the role of the service desk has expanded to support a much broader range of IT management activities, and IT organizations need to match their solutions to these maturing needs.
The service desk today functions as the front office of IT and orchestrator for many of the IT service management (ITSM) activities described in the ITIL best practice library. The process areas of incident and problem management, change management, configuration management, release management, and many more all need to be connected and orchestrated to benefit the service consumer. What's changing?
