The IT Decision Maker s Guide: How SaaS Can Benefit the IT Help Desk

Transcription

1 The IT Decision Maker s Guide: How SaaS Can Benefit the IT Help Desk Thought Leadership WHITE PAPER

2 Contents Executive Summary 1 The State of SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk 1 Who s Using SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk, and Why? 2 The Evolution of SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk 3 Obstacles to Adoption 4 Benefits of SaaS and the Cloud for the I.T. Help Desk 4

3 Executive Summary Businesses that are using software as a service (SaaS) to automate their IT help desk(s) and IT infrastructure are reporting significant savings. Their reasons for moving to SaaS from traditional software include greater efficiency, scalability, and reliability/availability; minimal startup costs; a low-cost monthly subscription; and automatic updates. These were among the key findings of the first survey of help desks and the cloud sponsored by BMC Software and salesforce.com. More than 200 IT executives, managers, and staff were surveyed about their adoption and opinions of SaaS for their IT help desk. More than half of survey respondents reported using SaaS for their IT help desk or IT infrastructure 23 percent for their IT help desk and nearly 28 percent for their IT infrastructure. Seventy percent had been using their solutions for at least a year. Although not all businesses have rushed to replace their traditional on-premise software with SaaS for the IT help desk, the survey findings suggest that SaaS is a viable and proven option for many companies. SaaS blends the IT staff and expertise that keep business people up and running the IT help desk with a reliable, scalable, self-updating, and broadly accessible application platform. SaaS frees the IT help desk from running and maintaining its own information technology, so help desk staff can focus on helping business users stay productive. Moreover, when its technology, best practices, and data reside in the cloud, the IT help desk can upgrade its capabilities more quickly, including adding mobility, Chatter, and other new capabilities that exploit the cloud. As the business environments they are supporting become more complex and dynamic, IT teams will need ever-simpler solutions for doing things better, faster, and more efficiently. SaaS and the cloud can meet these needs for the IT help desk in many businesses, just as has been done so effectively for customer relationship management (CRM), the IT infrastructure, human resources, and other functions. The State of SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk The survey findings paint an interesting picture and an interesting disconnect. The very features that businesses are demanding before they will move to a SaaS solution (such as proven cost-effectiveness advantages over on-premise solutions) are benefits that many businesses are already enjoying from their SaaS solutions. Seventy percent of SaaS users had been using their solutions for at least a year. More than 41 percent reported savings of between 10 and 50 percent from any of their SaaS applications. An additional 7 percent reported savings of more than 50 percent. The most desirable features in a SaaS solution were 99 percent reliability uptime, ease of use, the ability to reduce service costs, the ability to leverage self-service to empower users and improve customer satisfaction, and the ability to get started quickly with an automated setup. (See Table 1 on the next page.) 1

4 What features are most important to you in a solution avalable via SaaS? (Rank each of the features on a scale of 1 5, 1 being most important and 5 being least important.) Totals Quickly get started with an automated setup % % % % % % Personalize our portal to improve productivity % % % % 8 8.4% % Deflect help desk call volume through self-service % % % % % % Gain visibility into the environment through reporting and dashboards Leverage self-service to empower end users and improve customer satisfaction % % % % % % % % % % 9 9.5% % Reduce service costs % % % % % % Provide ease of use % % % % % % Have 99% reliability uptime % % % % % % Table 1. Key features delivered by SaaS Who s Using SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk, and Why? Although not all SaaS applications are created equal (see Three Common Misconceptions About SaaS for IT Management, page 5), the SaaS model itself is mature and tested. Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud company, has more than 87,000 enterprise customers and two million individual subscribers using its services and its Force.com platform for a variety of business-critical, hosted applications from sales and service (otherwise known as CRM) to IT infrastructure management and database management. Salesforce.com customers range from small- and medium-sized businesses to Fortune 1000 companies and multinationals. Twenty-three percent of those surveyed used SaaS for their IT help desk, and nearly 28 percent used SaaS for their IT infrastructure. Other uses included CRM, human resources/finance, and other applications. Slightly more than half were not using SaaS. As expected, respondents adopted SaaS solutions over traditional, on-premise solutions for a variety of IT services for the following key reasons: Efficiency Scalability Reliability and availability Minimal startup cost Low-cost monthly subscription and automatic upgrades Businesses with a mission-critical IT help desk and demanding operational requirements such as telecommunications vendors are entrusting their help desk to the cloud. For example, Allied Wireless Communications Corporation (AWCC) provides Alltel wireless services to more than 800,000 customers in six states. The company chose a cloud-based service desk solution that provides a consolidated service desk with self-service and inventory management capabilities. Key to the company s decision was the solution s strategic, subscription-based pricing and the speed of implementation. 2

5 The IT help desk is an ideal candidate for SaaS for several reasons. The help desk is an established function in IT, having been around since the days of mainframes. The function has mature, automated processes and standardized best practices, which have been bolstered further by best practices from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ). The IT help desk is in the critical path of business: A server problem or a lost password can knock a financial trader or customer offline, resulting in lost business. Speed, efficiency, effective collaboration, and scalability are important to success. By definition, the IT help desk is constantly changing as it adapts to new users, new business applications and systems, and new work patterns (such as mobile computing). The more you can automate and standardize the function, the more efficient you can make the entire experience for everyone involved. Nearly 32 percent of respondents not currently using SaaS for their help desk are using homegrown solutions or manual processes. This suggests the potential for savings and operational efficiencies by off-loading software maintenance, development, and administration to a SaaS application delivered over the cloud. The most effective IT help desk is mostly invisible. This means that IT is able to automatically solve most problems before people notice them and fix problems faster. The help desk empowers business people to reset their passwords, gain access to new services, or solve most of their own problems from their Web browsers or self-service portals. Now, picture being able to have a help desk that is better and faster and that reduces costs because you are using the Web and OPI (Other People s Infrastructure), while creating a better experience for help desk staffers and customers alike. That s the big advantage of SaaS and the cloud for the IT help desk. The Evolution of SaaS for the I.T. Help Desk As revealed by the survey, early adopters of the SaaS model for the IT help desk are realizing advantages, including operational savings, flexibility, and speed. The combination of proven, field-hardened SaaS platforms (such as salesforce.com) with proven, mature IT help desk software (such as the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite) can lower the risk and speed the ROI of deploying a SaaS solution. For example, such solutions can speed implementation, make IT staff productive more quickly, and enforce good standardized processes all of which save you time and money. After AWCC acquired markets from Verizon, we needed a service desk solution. With [BMC Remedyforce Service Desk], we got an out-of-the-box, ITIL -based solution that is easy for our employees to use, and we were able to set up the on-demand service desk in a matter of hours. Rob Grummer, service desk manager, Allied Wireless Communications Corp (AWCC) Based on our experience with the help desk, BMC is confident that as SaaS becomes more firmly entrenched in the IT help desk, it will open up new opportunities for efficiencies, including improving communication, collaboration, and first-call problem solving by taking advantage of the social Web. SaaS eventually could establish new benchmarks for IT help desk responsiveness and performance among business users, making the move to the cloud a competitive necessity for businesses in some industries. Everyone in IT today is thinking about how to do things better, faster, and cheaper. One way to achieve this goal is to focus on the things that the business is known for your products and services and outsource the things that aren t your specialty, such as certain kinds of IT management. For many companies, SaaS will liberate the IT help desk staff from drudgery so that they can focus 100 percent of their efforts on keeping business people working. Although many organizations are still hesitant to adopt SaaS offerings as part of their service portfolio, this survey demonstrates that SaaS solutions are making great headway in addressing concerns over security, privacy, and data logistics. As more and more IT and business service decisions are being made with a broader effect on the business perspective, the allure of the SaaS model is in fact being justified through the increasing statistical data reported by those who have already adopted this alternative service model. 3

6 Obstacles to Adoption The survey also provides insights into why some businesses may have hesitated to adopt SaaS for their IT help desk, as shown in Table 2. Seventy-eight percent of respondents who are not currently using SaaS for their IT help desk or IT infrastructure said that they would consider using SaaS for service management if they could demonstrate that it is more cost-effective than their current help desk solutions. The ability to satisfactorily address privacy and security concerns, the availability of out-of-the-box best practices, and the availability of inventory management control features are also important. Respondents not currently using SaaS for IT service management cited the following factors as important motivators for moving to SaaS: proven cost-savings; ease of use; improvement in customer satisfaction; out-of-the-box best practices for help desk, service desk, and inventory management; and automatic upgrades. Respondents who are not using SaaS indicated that their current IT help desk solution meets most of their needs, but there are additional features that they would like. Others said that their solution is not meeting their needs and that they are outgrowing it. Would your company consider using SaaS in the future for your help desk? (Check all that apply.) There were 107 responses. Count Percent % Yes, if we could demonstrate that is was more cost-effective than our current help desk % Yes, if it used out-of-the-box best practices for service management % Yes, if we could addresss security and privacy concerns % Yes, if we could control inventory management % Table 2. Considerations for SaaS in the future Benefits of SaaS and the Cloud for the I.T. Help Desk This section expands upon the results of the survey by discussing in more detail how the new generation of SaaS applications for the IT help desk can provide businesses with many benefits: Ease of Use and Access: Browser-based interfaces provide fast, familiar access to data and capabilities. There s minimal need for training, and help desk staff can easily customize their personal dashboards to make themselves even more productive. Your staff can access their dashboards anytime, anywhere, from any Web browser or their mobile devices, as can your customers. With a good SaaS application, you can be up and running in minutes. Pay-as-You-Grow Model: With SaaS, businesses rent the software applications, paying a monthly fee for each user. This means that you pay only for what you use, and you can scale up or down based on what s going on in your business. For example, a retailer could temporarily add IT help desk staff during the holiday season, or a financial services company could add staff during tax season. There s no costly overhead software licenses, servers, maintenance, power, and cooling sitting in the background eating up your budget. Just pure application capability, available when and where you need it. 4

7 Three Common Misconceptions about SaaS for I.T. Management There are many vendors offering SaaS applications for IT management. That makes for a lot of product announcements, market noise, and confusion and misconceptions. Here are three common misconceptions and some advice on what to look for as you navigate the many choices. All SaaS applications are created equal. Not true. Just as with traditional software, there are important considerations beyond basic capabilities and price. Important considerations include availability (which may be more critical in some industries than others), privacy, and security. Privacy and security may be critically important for businesses that are in regulated industries or that conduct business in Europe, where privacy regulations may require that data be housed in the country in which it is generated. In these two cases, larger, more established SaaS providers may be able to meet these requirements more cost-effectively. SaaS applications are inherently less secure than on-premise solutions. Again, not true. Data that resides on an onpremise server may actually be less secure than data stored in a cloud application. Data on a local server can be hacked or can walk out the door on a thumb drive or a mobile phone. Data in SaaS applications typically is housed in off-premise data centers that are protected by high-grade firewalls, secure transport protocols, multitenancy technology, and enterprise-grade security. SaaS providers are in the business of providing service assurance, not just renting software capabilities; thus, they can usually provide better security and privacy than you could for yourself.»» Moving to SaaS means sacrificing functionality and best practices. Absolutely not true. In fact, for many organizations, moving to SaaS may provide functionality and best practices that they could not have acquired cost-effectively any other way. With a good SaaS application for the IT help desk, businesses should not notice any difference in basic functionality. You are still getting the functionality in coded software that s been developed, programmed, and continually improved over many years. It s simply a different ownership model. Out-of-the-Box Best Practices: Best-in-class SaaS applications for the IT help desk include preconfigured, ITIL-based processes for incident management, selfservice, and inventory management. SaaS vendors have an edge: They can draw on the real-time collective experience of many IT professionals (their customer base) to stay current with the latest practices something you could never do cost-effectively yourself. And SaaS can deploy these practices to everyone as soon as the practices are available something not possible with traditional software. Standardization: SaaS applications can help you deploy and enforce standardized processes more easily. Availability/Uptime: To remain competitive, SaaS vendors must provide high service levels. Self-Service: A good SaaS application will let you easily create and publish self-service portals for your customers so they can reset their passwords, troubleshoot simple problems, and provision new services without assistance from a help desk technician. This kind of self-service can eliminate nearly half of your most repetitive incidents. You can also customize these portals easily for your best customers or for specific sets of customers in an industry. Automatic Upgrades: SaaS vendors can push new capabilities out to their customers over the cloud as soon as they are available a new update every day, if they want. For businesses, this means no more cumbersome software upgrades that can take the help desk offline. Updates happen automatically, in the background. Advanced multitenancy technology and other technologies ensure that everyone on your team is updated on the same schedule. Privacy and Security: Established SaaS vendors serve thousands of customers from huge, secure data centers. Advanced privacy and security technologies, along with multitenancy technology, enable SaaS vendors to serve many customers while keeping their data separate and their access private. Managed services where one organization, such as a service bureau, processes data and transactions for another organization have been around since the 1980s. Data formats and privacy/security practices emerged from those services. Today, these concepts and practices are now moving to the cloud, where they continue to evolve alongside new advancements. Scalability: Want to add new features or upgrade data capacity? One of the big advantages of a best-in-class SaaS application is the ability to easily and cost-effectively do both, making it highly unlikely that you will ever outgrow your SaaS solution. Gateway to the Cloud: When your IT help desk resides in the cloud, you can easily integrate it with other capabilities such as the latest productivityenhancing technologies available from your SaaS vendor because the technologies all use common infrastructure. For example, you can integrate your help desk with your company s CRM application through preconfigured connections provided by the vendor. You can try new mobility applications that deliver help desk functions on mobile devices. You can let IT staff and business people collaborate and share information securely within the enterprise using social applications, like Chatter. 5

8 Offloading your IT help desk infrastructure opens up new opportunities for improving productivity, delivering higher service levels to your customers, and achieving greater efficiencies in inventory management. Creating and maintaining an effective configuration management database (CMDB) for your IT help desk is much easier and less expensive, because you can get the capacity you need when you need it. And, because your CMDB resides in the cloud, it is much more flexible to use and easier to integrate with CMDBs in other areas of IT to help you run the business more efficiently. Based on the experience of survey respondents with SaaS overall, using SaaS for your IT help desk should provide significant savings and fast ROI. More than 41 percent reported realizing savings of between 10 and 50 percent from their various SaaS applications, and an additional 7 percent reported savings of more than 50 percent. Still, it s important to note that SaaS is not a magic cure for every business. Some IT help desks may use a simple, homegrown solution that can be managed with a single administrator. Conversely, other IT help desks may have complex or highly customized processes that they have built and maintained for years. In both cases, the cost and risk of migrating to a SaaS model may outweigh the savings and benefits. As with any other IT investment, you should do a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis that considers migration costs as well as overhead costs (software licenses, maintenance, customizations, infrastructure resource consumption, and so on). BMC can provide TCO models for you to work from. As more businesses successfully outsource their IT infrastructure to the cloud, other businesses will likely see the value of SaaS applications for the IT help desk. To learn more about SaaS solutions from BMC, please visit: Survey Background The survey of the help desk and the cloud was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the help of TechTarget, a global technology media company that operates more than 90 technology-specific Web sites serving nine million registered members. Survey respondents came from a cross section of industries and a range of company sizes, and each held different roles in IT. Company Size 35 percent worked for companies with 101 to 250 employees 45 percent worked for companies with 251 to 1,000 employees 20 percent worked for companies with 1,001 to 2,500 employees Job Function 54 percent were technical resources 46 percent represented mid- and executive-level management The survey results provide insights into the experience of businesses that have deployed and are using SaaS for their IT help desk, and the questions focused on that area. The results also provide insights into the mindsets of those businesses that have yet to make the move, including the possible reasons why. 6

9 Business Runs on I.T. I.T. Runs on BMC Software Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. Visit for more information. BMC, BMC Software, and the BMC Software logo are the exclusive properties of BMC Software, Inc., are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other BMC trademarks, service marks, and logos may be registered or pending registration in the U.S. or in other countries. IT Infrastructure Library is a registered trademark of the Office of Government Commerce and is used here by BMC Software, Inc., under license from and with the permission of OGC. ITIL is a registered trademark, and a registered community trademark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and is used here by BMC Software, Inc., under license from and with the permission of OGC. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. * *