Benefits of an ITIL Help Desk in the Cloud

SOLUTION WHITE PAPER Benefits of an ITIL Help Desk in the Cloud A New ITIL Solution for Small-to-Medium Businesses

Contents Introduction 1 Help Desk Needs in Smaller Environments 1 Power in the Cloud 3 Summary 6

Introduction Smaller IT organizations, such as those serving small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and departments within larger organizations, must deliver world-class service on a small company budget. With increasing financial pressures and constraints, an already overworked staff and ever-increasing customer expectations, you know that getting the most out of every minute and dollar is crucial to survival and growth. Unlike larger enterprises that have significant resources to develop and maintain IT processes, you must concentrate on your core business before thinking about IT best practices. This can force you into merely fighting fires rather than taking a structured and pragmatic approach to delivering business value. You struggle with the cost and effort of upgrading help desk applications and justifying the up-front investment they require in hardware, software, and staff while knowing they can help you in the long run through lower management costs and improved visibility into the delivery of IT services. SMBs and departments within larger organizations often lack the resources to deliver the help desk best practices their users require. While you don t have the luxury to customize and maintain the infrastructure to run your help desk, you don t want to sacrifice flexibility and get boxed into a one-size-fits-all solution. You need to be able to add a new workflow to the system, or a new feature to a user interface, without waiting weeks or months for a developer to implement it. Finally, you want to be able to grow your capabilities over time, adding new time-saving and cost-saving capabilities, such as user self-service or an online knowledge base. You can get all this, and more, with BMC Remedyforce Service Desk.. This new service delivers easy-to-use and powerful help desk, self-service, and incident management tools built on ITIL-based best practices, along with the low total cost of ownership, power, and personalization provided by the proven Force.com cloud-based infrastructure. This cloud-based SaaS solution will help you quickly automate routine workflows, cut repetitive management tasks, improve service quality, and ease compliance all while reducing costs to give you the benefits of a world-class help desk at a great value. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk provides the benefits of a world-class help desk at a great value. Help Desk Needs in Smaller Environments As part of an SMB or departmental IT organization, you may lack the resources to support a highly customized IT help desk application, maintain sophisticated change and release processes, implement sophisticated identity and access controls, or develop best practices based on standards, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ). What s more, you may find that making changes to your help desk application to reflect how your business works or to implement ITIL processes is often too difficult or expensive to be practical. Having to buy and configure help desk software weeks or even months before it starts delivering value makes it harder to justify the purchase, even if it saves money and increases service quality in the long run. Help desk pain points:» Lack of resources» Up-front cost of hardware, software» Poor processes» Delayed time to value» Keeping current with the latest version 1

As an IT leader, you need a flexible help desk solution that gives you a single view into your IT infrastructure, improves service quality, measures improvement over time, and gives you a roadmap to add capabilities, such as change, configuration, event, and application management. With BMC Remedyforce Service Desk, customers can: Reduce help desk costs by automating repetitive service requests and service fulfillment processes Eliminate most repetitive incidents by offering personalized self-service portals for common tasks, such as password reset and requests for access Minimize service escalations through search capabilities and FAQs Reduce capital expenses for hardware and software, as well as lower operational expenses associated with managing and maintaining the service desk application Achieve fast, cost-effective compliance with corporate, regulatory, industry, and/or government security requirements Track hardware, software, and business services to better assure cost-efficient, quality service delivery Implement ITIL-based best practices quickly to reduce costs and maximize service quality Achieve rapid time-to-value through rapid deployment A world-class, cloud-based help desk can:» Reduce costs, improve quality of service» Eliminate manual work, encourage self-service» Speed compliance and implementation of best practices» Make it easy to add new capabilities as needed» Free trial at www.bmc.com/remedyforce Figure 1: Self-service capabilities allow users to solve problems themselves, reducing service costs while speeding problem resolution. Users can personalize the choice and appearance of information they see to meet their specific needs. 2

BMC Remedyforce Service Desk was developed based on BMC s experience helping thousands of customers worldwide implement ITIL best practices. It includes field-proven, out-of-the-box ITIL processes for service support and service delivery; interactive, Web-based access to ITIL models, procedures, processes, and work instructions; key performance indicators; and a dictionary of ITIL terms. This helps customers make more effective use of their help desk solution, thus reducing costs and improving service by continuously optimizing processes. The Alignability Process Model included in BMC Remedyforce Service Desk can eliminate the need to spend months developing processes and training staff. Need ITIL? BMC Remedyforce Service Desk provides out-of-the-box ITIL processes, Web-based access to ITIL models and processes, KPIs, and a dictionary of ITIL terms all developed through BMC s experience with thousands of customers. The solution s asset tracking and configuration management allows administrators to drill into graphical views of IT components so they can easily troubleshoot outages and determine their impact on the business. Users can personalize what information is presented, as well as its appearance, to maximize their productivity. This can steer as many as 70 percent of calls away from the help desk, freeing the IT staff for more important work. Power in the Cloud BMC Remedyforce Service Desk is the result of a strategic alliance between BMC and salesforce.com to deliver BMC s IT management solutions on the Force.com platform. The decision to deliver help desk functionality as the first joint offering of this relationship is the result of overwhelming customer demand for critical service desk functions and processes delivered via the cloud. Designed for customers who need strong IT-business integration and rapid time-to-value, this offering leverages BMC s industry-leading expertise, and the trusted and scalable Force.com platform. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk:» Provides ITIL-based help desk, self-service, and incident/inventory management» Slashes user wait times from minutes to seconds.» Boosts first-call resolution rates from 30 to 90 percent» Streamlines setup through wizard-guided templates» Puts management tools and data at administrators fingertips BMC Remedyforce Service Desk provides ITIL-based help desk, self-service, and incident and inventory management that can slash user wait times from minutes to seconds and increase first-call resolution rates from 30 to 90 percent. It streamlines setup through the use of wizard-guided templates, includes a personalized portal that puts management tools at administrators fingertips, reduces training needs, and speeds time-to-productivity through a simplified user experience. 3

Figure 2: BMC Remedyforce Service provides an intuitive, personalized interface and central platform for initiating and resolving incidents. Wizard-driven tools simplify the creation of workflow, queries, and configuration, while personalized QuickViews provide instant access to important service data. It also provides powerful workflow and reporting capabilities to speed problem resolution and highlight potential service delivery issues. Used by more than 72,500 companies worldwide, the Force.com platform is the most widely used cloud platform in the world. This field proven infrastructure provides 99.9 percent reliability, enterprise-class security, and the benefits of instant, effortless upgrades at no additional cost all while eliminating the need for both IT infrastructure and ongoing management and maintenance of the service desk application. The Force.com platform, the world s leading cloud platform, provides 99.9 percent reliability, enterpriseclass security, and instant, effortless upgrades along with quick time to value and flexible usage models. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk provides: Fast deployment, low-cost commitment up front because BMC Remedyforce Service Desk is available immediately, getting you up and running in a matter of days. It also delivers long-term savings in hardware, power, and management costs. SaaS-based budgeting means that with a monthly subscription, you can now deploy critical IT services utilizing your operating budget, which allows you to plan and budget for a set amount to reduce risk and unpredictable expenses. Zero-cost, zero-effort upgrades that are instantly available to every user with no need to schedule, perform, or test upgrades for each client. Flexible usage so that scaling your deployment is as easy as changing the number of licenses in use. There is no need to make changes to individual users PCs, purchase additional hardware, or worry about storage, network capacity, or software licenses when demand increases. 4

Support for easy personalization because even authorized non-technical users can modify the way information is displayed. With the platform s support for real-time, point-and-click rules development, a help desk manager, for example, can easily set new thresholds for escalating a problem or implement different escalation or support policies for different users or departments at different times during the day or month. Administrators can easily extend the database to accommodate new data items. And all this can be done without the need for additional programming or expensive specialists. Even non-technical users can personalize the interface and add rules to meet your specific needs. Figure 3: Business users can easily create and personalize dashboards and reports that show the information most critical to them and administrators. 99.9 percent uptime through the work of a full-time staff dedicated to constantly assuring reliability and performance, providing higher levels of availability than many customers could achieve on their own. On average, the Force.com platform delivers data to users in less than 300 milliseconds, and publishes both its recent and historical performance and uptime data on its Web site (www.trust.salesforce.com). Enterprise-grade security with a full-time security staff that few SMBs could afford. The Force.com platform complies with the toughest security certifications in the industry, including ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, and SysTrust. This is the same level of security trusted by some of the world s toughest customers who rely on salesforce.com. The Force.com platform also provides granular security and sharing rules to let customers decide which users see what information, all the way down to the field level. This facilitates the delegation of less critical tasks to less-skilled workers, lowering support costs while assuring proper levels of security. Ease of deployment on mobile devices, allowing immediate deployment of BMC Remedyforce Service Desk across multiple smartphone platforms. Remote users and administrators have access to all the functions, as well as personalization capabilities, as onsite users. Management and Reporting because the Force.com platform provides unprecedented ease in creating the reports and dashboards, or high-level summaries, that business managers need to understand how well IT is supporting the business. 5

Summary BMC Remedyforce Service Desk delivers a faster, more cost-effective, ITIL-based help desk solution than ever before possible. It helps organizations increase the quality and measurability of their IT services, while also eliminating the headaches and costs of managing a help desk application. What s more, it gives users the flexibility to adapt anything from the user interface to support processes to meet their needs. All this is provided by the rock-solid, field-proven Force.com infrastructure that powers companies around the world. To see a demo, request pricing, or get a 30-day free trial, please visit www.bmc.com/remedyforce. 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 December 31, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $2 billion. Visit www.bmc.com for more information. About Salesforce.com Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com s real-time, multitenant architecture, the company s platform and CRM applications have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers, including: Sales Cloud for sales force automation and contact management; Service Cloud for customer service and support solutions; Chatter for social collaboration, Force.com platform for custom application development and the AppExchange, the world s leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing. 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. 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. 2010 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. *194255*