Disruptive Technologies And ITSM Tools
“Changes In the Wind For the ITSM Tool Community”
As I prepare to join my fellow Pinkers on this years multi-city PinkPERSPECTIVE Roadshow, my thoughts wander to the many technology changes that are impacting the collective lives of those of us who are involved in IT Service Management. Aside from the obvious impact of the economic climate there are several disruptive technologies that are changing the rules of the game we have known until now.
The Impact of Software As A Service: (Sometimes it make sense to rent versus own)
The growing popularity of Software As A Service (SaaS) models and the maturing of the concept of Cloud Computing as an alternative model for purchasing IT Services is driving many changes in the options available to ITIL project managers looking for an ITSM solution. Whether it is a short term or long term strategy SaaS has many compelling arguments to consider such as speed to implement, limited capital investment in infrastructure, predictability in costs, etc..
In the ITSM Tool space vendors such as Service-Now have pioneered this model and many of their traditional client server based competitors are now following suit by offering their tools in a hosted model. This is particularly true of those tools which are based on Web and browser technologies versus a traditional installed client model. I have been watching Service-Now’s development with interest over the last few years as they have grown their client base with many impressive wins and have driven change in the rest of the ITSM Tool space with an innovative solution that has been developed based on ITIL best practices from day 1. In a recent article posted by Rhett Glauser “An expensive compliment from a friend” Rhett describes Service-Now’s challenges with and thoughts on the question of Tool Certification and their upcoming engagement with our PinkVERIFY service.
The Growing Popularity of Living In The Clouds
On a related topic my friend Rodrigo Flores of NewScale has launched a new blog called “Cloud Front Office” where he discusses the concepts of public and private cloud computing strategies as a powerful tool to support the rapid deployment and provisioning of IT services in a virtual environment. The concept of Cloud Computing combined with SaaS has been gaining in popularity and maturity for several years. With the emergence of private clouds where you can contract with a provider to create a Cloud environment within the safety and security of your own IT walls many of the last resistance factors are quickly fading away. When the average metric for a hosting service is around 12 cents a CPU hour and the added pressure of not having the same latitude as in years past to spend on IT infrastructure without constraints, the concept of turning to cloud based solutions for both development and production environments is coming of age.
The Emergence of Open Source ITSM Tools
One of my personal rants for the past several years as been about the lack of movement towards an open data model or architecture for ITSM tools. We have had the CMDB Consortium around for years, The World Wide Web Consortium (W3) has been working on a Service Modeling Language (SML), and recently another group was formed to develop a standard Service Portfolio and Catalog Language (SPACL). Lots of action but little movement if you know what I mean! In my view this is largely due to a general lack of an Open-source tool community in the ITSM space. It is my perspective that only when the vendor community is faced with a strong open alternative will they move to adopt open standards. At our conference in February I was delivering this traditional cry of frustration when I was approached by a person claiming to have worked on the development of one of the first Open Source ITSM Tools sets. OTRS stands for Open source Ticket Request System and is available for free for those who are of a mind to try their hand at its configuration. I realize it is early days in this category but it is nice to see the emergence of Open Source alternatives.
We plan to talk about these interesting developments at our PinkPERSPECTIVE events over the next two weeks and look forward to dialoging with those of you whom I meet on our 8 City Tour.
Troy’s Thoughts What Are Yours?
”Disruptive technologies: These are wild and unexpected technological breakthroughs that require corporations to radically rethink their very existence.” ~Christensen
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