Market Trends Driving Today’s Service Desk Requirements

IT has simultaneously contributed to businesses’ expansion across international boundaries and created greater global competition. It has improved worker productivity and assisted with the rise of the mobile workforce, but it has also increased the risk of systems failures. The mobile workforce comes with escalating demands; they often need remote support in order to perform their jobs.

Small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) often find themselves shorthanded when it comes to taking full advantage of technology, while larger enterprises are often frustrated by the fact that their IT staff spends too much time maintaining their own IT systems. In both cases, businesses would prefer to be using their limited resources to perform more strategic tasks that can have a greater impact, rather than maintaining the status quo and reacting to problems.

According to Yankee Group, the vast majority of IT problems are caused by human error. Gartner estimates that, because of this, most IT departments spend over 80% of their time trying to resolve problems rather than directly helping their organizations achieve their business objectives. MSPs handle these responsive hassles so their end-user organizations can focus on business. In order to manage services successfully, however, MSPs must implement efficient service desk functions.

Unfortunately, traditional network/system management (NSM) software platforms fail to address the above issues. IBM’s NetView, HP’s OpenView, and other traditional NSM platforms are simultaneously too expensive for most SMBs to acquire and too complex for larger enterprises to fully utilize. Traditional NSM platforms are not fully automated. They require considerable manual effort simply to perform various basic functions. They also lack open architecture. As a result, third-party attempts to enhance basic NSM functionality are difficult or impossible to implement.

The marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive, and companies of all sizes seek to both better position themselves and improve their operating efficiency. In order to do this, companies must discover ways to improve the reliability and cost-effectiveness of their IT operations. For some organizations, this means acquiring the right software and training so they can strengthen their in house skills. Others view the service desk as outside of their core concerns and seek to outsource to an expert provider.