Data Center Strategies for the CIO
Systems management software
Gold Award:
Service-now.com Fall 2009 release
Service-Now is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based systems management tool that provides IT process automation and IT service management functions, competing against the entrenched vendors in the Big Four -- BMC, CA, HP and IBM. The company has had a lot of success taking customers away from its much larger competitors by offering simple pricing plans ($100 per seat per month) and frequent, painless software upgrades. In 2009, SearchDataCenter.com reported on data center managers jumping ship from clunky legacy framework tools to Service-Now, and enthusiasm for the software has grown steadily. More companies have decided that, in a down economy with shrinking IT staff and budgets, it doesn't make sense to spend man-hours and budget maintaining the management tools when you can buy the majority of the functionality you need as a service over the Web. Customers and analysts raved about Service-Now in 2009.
Service-now.com updates its ITSM application set with significant new functionality three times per year. IT managers get these new features automatically, with no onerous upgrade or reimplementation. What's more, all customer application customizations are preserved through the automated upgrade process.
The Winter 2009 release includes the following updates.
- Browser access for iPhone, Blackberry and Android.
- Google-like global search for all service desk and configuration management system (CMS) data
- MyYahoo!-like drag-and-drop UI and Web components customization
- Amazon.com-like service catalog
The Winter 2009 release also includes new applications for IT project management and a graphical workflow engine that are natively integrated through all ITIL-based process elements of the application. Service-now.com has used ITIL as a development design document to define integrated applications for incident, problem, change, release and configuration management as well as a number of extension processes including service request and fulfillment, knowledge management and service-level management. Service-now.com also provides customers with related application for CMDB, inventory discovery, IT asset management, service catalog, project management, workflow automation and shared services for other line-of-business applications.