So finally one of the Big 4 – BMC Software has taken their service desk offering to the cloud. BMC Software announced this strategic alliance at Dreamforce 2009, Salesforce.com’s premier cloud-computing event. This new alliance will help BMC put its IT management solutions on the Force.com platform.

Not Remedy
BMC is planning to put the Service Desk Express application on Force.com and will deliver cloud-enabled service desk, self-service and inventory management capabilities.

BMC mentioned that it is currently scheduled to be available in the second quarter of calendar year 2010. This is interesting because Microsoft is also planning to release their version of the service desk technology sometime in 2010.

New Beginnings
This announcement among others at Dreamforce 2009 is a new beginning for both Salesforce.com and BMC Software. Salesforce.com has been trying to tell its client base that it is not a CRM company and with vendors like BMC and CA, it is able to provide a set of enterprise apps on the cloud. This will help BMC Software move away from its traditional software delivery method to the cloud.

Pricing for the new service has not been revealed yet.

Interesting Times Ahead
It will be interesting to see how this new service from one of the Big4 fares with established service-desk-on-demand players like Service-now.com and Zendesk. HP and CA have on-demand versions of the service desk technology too. What do you think?

CLARK, N.J.–RightAnswers, Inc., the recognized leader in providing self-service and IT knowledge management solutions, today announced a technology partnership with Service-now.com – the pioneer of IT service management via SaaS. RightAnswers offers full integration with Service-now.com products, allowing numerous joint customers a seamless transition and the combined benefits of two industry leading products.

“Our company quickly integrated the RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite into our Service Management application, which was migrated from a legacy Incident Management application to Service-now.com,” explained Jacque Rowden, User Services Manager at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP. “The integration was seamless and provided an easy transition.”

Service-now.com customers can now add the RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite™ to their IT service desk application. More than 225 organizations and 3.5 million end users currently rely on RightAnswers for all of their knowledge needs. The RightAnswers suite helps IT support organizations manage and share knowledge more efficiently, making support analysts more effective and empowering end users to find solutions on their own. By adding the Suite to a Service-now.com instance, organizations can recognize a 20% reduction in costs, 20% drop in incidents, dramatically improved first call resolution rates, and improved user satisfaction.

“We are excited about the opportunity of working more closely with Service-now.com, as our visions and technologies are very complimentary and align quite well,” said Jeff Weinstein, President and CEO at RightAnswers. “Together we bring a ‘best-of-breed’ offering in our respective spaces, providing customers with a cost effective way to support their users, while deploying cutting-edge technology.”

RightAnswers differentiates itself from other solutions by treating knowledge management as a process, not just a product. RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite includes ongoing proactive knowledge management services that ensure content is effective and remains current on an ongoing basis. Combining such an advanced knowledge solution with Service-now.com improves incident and problem management by making information available at several points during each process within the Service-now.com application.

“Web services and open APIs used by modern applications simplify enterprise IT integrations,” explained Gadi Yedwab, Service-now.com VP of product development. “We believe it is our responsibility to ensure our application works in our customer’s IT environment. That said, we have delivered more than three dozen integrations with more added all the time. Many Service-now.com customers currently experience more efficient IT service through our integration with the RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite.”

Service-now.com enterprise IT service management software integrates ITIL v3 processes, software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, and Web-native functionality to provide a flexible, intuitive and self-managing application. For more information about Service-now.com integration, please visit http://wiki.service-now.com index.php?title=Integrations.

About RightAnswers, Inc.

RightAnswers delivers the high-impact content, technology solutions and value-added services to enable internal Help Desk organizations to improve the end-user support experience, increase support capacity and reduce support costs. The RightAnswers Unified Knowledge Suite provides the tools needed to facilitate rapid problem resolution for both self-service end-users and support analysts. RightAnswers solutions are used by more than 3.5 million licensed end users across hundreds of companies including commercial enterprises, higher education institutions and government agencies. For more information, visit www.rightanswers.com.

Innovative Help Desk Software Delivers SMS Tickets and Service Requests to Apple iPhone, Google Android; Serves Growing Base of 1,000+ Customers Including Twitter, MSNBC

LAS VEGAS, NV–(Marketwire – March 31, 2009) – CTIA Wireless Conference — As text messaging continues to expand beyond peer-to-peer and into to tens of thousands of business, community and government applications — from social networking, banking, travel and transportation, education, call centers, and more — Clickatell and Zendesk announced their work to mobilize IT help desks and customer support centers around the world. Instead of physically racing back to the cubicle to check the status queue or culling endless voicemails to sort requests and changes, IT and customer support staff can depend on anytime, anywhere Clickatell SMS Service Alerts™ to instantly notify and update IT help desk professionals with customer support status for technical problems, provide real-time service delivery schedule information and coordination and instill greater productivity throughout organizations.

Available for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android and countless other mobile devices, Zendesk lists notable customers such as Twitter, MSNBC, The Rackspace Cloud, Definiens, and more than 1,000 other small, medium and large enterprises. Zendesk notifies help desk agents with new ticket assignments and outstanding requests delivered to their mobile phone via SMS, which is immediate, reliable and cost-effective even when voice calls and emails may not be. IT help desk professionals need instant information to tend to mission critical support issues and to prevent them from wasting time and energy tracking down technical difficulties that have already been fixed. SMS Service Alerts offer freedom and independence to IT help desk and customer service professionals to operate more like the mobile emergency experts they really are.

“Despite being run ragged every day with inadequate service tracking and scheduling tools, IT and customer support workers everywhere are the real un-sung heroes of the enterprise,” says Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell’s CEO. “They are responsible for solving the problems that if gone unchecked halt productivity and impact employees and customers which ultimately affects the bottom line. Given today’s economic situation, Clickatell SMS Service Alerts are just the answer that these hardworking professionals are looking for to maximize their already vital role within the enterprise. SMS is the most immediate, reliable and broadly available communication means ever invented because there is no need to download anything, no requirement to access software — just simply read the text message when it arrives on the phone.”

Definiens Customers Benefit from SMS Customer Service

As the number one Enterprise Image Intelligence® company, Definiens chose Zendesk Mobile Help Desk and Clickatell SMS to deliver state-of-the-art customer service and support. Definiens provides image analysis software that is at heart of critical business processes in drug discovery, medical imaging and remote sensing. The company wanted to globally provide user friendly and real-time customer support and chose to implement mobile customer service using Zendesk and Clickatell.

Definiens’ software analyzes and interprets digital images on every scale, from microscopic cell structures to satellite pictures. Using the unique Definiens Cognition Network Technology® it emulates the powerful human cognitive processes to automatically extract intelligence from images.

“Our customers and support staff are located across the globe. It is imperative that our distributed teams are kept a breast of the latest information about new and active support incidents, wherever they happen to be and at anytime. Using the combination of Zendesk and mobile notifications enables us to offer our customers the highest levels of service,” explains Dr. Wolfgang Rencken, Definiens COO. “With Zendesk and Clickatell, mobile help desk implementation was easy, operation is simple and the results are impeccable. We have implemented a truly mobile, global help desk to serve our customers — anytime and anywhere.”

“Our software is even more valuable when customers can implement mobility to their IT Service operations so they can count on it no matter the time or location,” comments Mikkel Svane, Zendesk CEO. “Able to be implemented in less than a day, Clickatell is the only mobile messaging provider who offers an easy to deploy and use Software-as-a-Service messaging service and they are truly global.”

About Clickatell

Clickatell enables businesses, governments and communities to leverage the ubiquity of mobile messaging to inform, alert, notify, transact, interact and share information. Delivering mobile messaging solutions since 2000, Clickatell is a global leader in mobile communications specializing in SaaS messaging services and Bulk SMS gateway connectivity to small, medium and large enterprises in a variety of vertical markets. Clickatell’s multi-modal capability and worldwide coverage gives organizations the power to deliver any message to any device anywhere in the world. Reaching 775 networks in more than 200 countries, Clickatell serves 8,300 customers including BBC, Continental Airlines, CNN, First National Bank, Metropolitan Life, Oracle, Shell, and other industry leaders. Clickatell products and services increase customer acquisition, improve loyalty and build trusted brands through direct, personal, easy, and immediate communications. A Sequoia-backed company, Clickatell is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, and has offices in South Africa. For more information, please visit http://www.clickatell.com/central/campaigns/redir.php?cid=96149

About Zendesk

Zendesk is an enterprise cloud computing company delivering an on-demand helpdesk solution for businesses and corporate IT organizations based on the latest Web 2.0 technologies and design philosophies that unifies the traditional internal helpdesk with a company’s online presence to deliver seamless, superior customer support. Delivered 100% on-demand over the Web, Zendesk goes beyond the standard database-driven ticket tracking, business rule automation, views and reporting of traditional helpdesk systems to provide native Web 2.0 capabilities throughout, including seamless email-ticket integration, customizable views and associated RSS feeds, tag-based categorization, system-wide search, unlimited forums, mash-up widget-based extension, plus a comprehensive REST/JSON/XML API for data exchange or application integration, mash-ups and widget development.
Press contacts:

Kelly Brieger
Clickatell USA
+1-650-704-1748

On-demand software is becoming more popular these days with the growth of broadband and faster computing. Services like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Flickr and Facebook have become part of our every day lives. People don’t write diaries anymore, they blog. They don’t create albums anymore, they post pictures online.

That has happened in the corporate space too, where native applications have moved to the cloud. This solves a lot of problems for the organization or business.

• They don’t have to install/maintain hardware for serving those applications.
• They don’t have to spend on power to maintain that hardware.
• They don’t have to have the workforce to take care of that setup.

On the cloud means someone else has your server, application, support personnel. The only thing you need to do is sign up for the service. And they will help you get up and running.

In the help desk software space, there are a number of vendors who provide help desk on-demand. Service-now.com, Parature and Zendesk.com are some prime examples. Cherwell Software made an announcement on Thursday that they have come up with an on-demand version of their help desk. ManageEngine announced their on-demand network monitoring solution last month. Along with that annoucement, they mentioned that they will bringing out their service desk application on the cloud too.

So many vendors going on the cloud. They should see some trend. But are they getting customers? Of course they do. But are they getting any big customers. Are businesses really cutting down their IT workforce? The question really is – do they trust a third-party vendor to take care of their infrastructure. What about stability? Will these vendors be able to provide stable apps 24×7. We have heard of downtimes from even the giants – Google and Yahoo!

But I am still optimistic. I think on-demand is the next logical step. It makes a lot of sense to me. Any business can go the cloud and avoid expenses on infrastructure and personnel. It is easier to get started and you are up and running faster than you would with on-premise software.

I would love to hear what you think. Post your comments.