ManageEngine announced a managed services edition of their help desk software – ServiceDesk Plus. The new release is a complete web-based integrated package, including incident and service request management, self-service portal, knowledge base, IT asset management, even purchase and contract management. The new software is available in either a Standard Edition, providing the full range of basic help desk management functions, with a knowledge base and self service portal; or Professional Edition, which includes all the features found in the Standard Edition plus complete asset management.

Managed services allow organizations outsource the regular tasks like IT/network/help desk management to third party service providers. This helps those organizations focus on their core business and keep costs low because someone else is taking care of those problems. With the right service levels, managed services can help reduce the ticket resolution times and bring expertise to the table, something which the regular organization does not have to invest in. The service provider, of course, gets the advantage to  share his expertise and costs among multiple accounts getting better ROI.

The new offering from ManageEngine gives the service provider the software to manage the help desk services of multiple accounts. It covers basic ticket management with service levels, knowledge base, self-service portal, asset management. Interestingly, the new edition derives from one of their flagship products that comes ready with ITIL modules like incident, problem and change management. But it looks like the new MSP edition will not have the ITIL modules built into it for now.

A simple Google search will tell you there are many companies who provide such services to their clients. One of them has been quoted in the official ManageEngine press release – “As a Managed Service Provider who has been in the IT helpdesk industry for over 18 years and used a number of different helpdesk applications to support over a hundred customers, we believe that we have finally found a solution that fulfills our requirements,” said Jason Roberts, Technical Manager for TCNS, an IT and Network Support provider. “ManageEngine allows our customers to be kept up-to-date on a three-tier level – telephone, web and email – provides excellent SLA options based on individual customers, allows our technical staff to be kept updated instantly on all requests, and most of all, provides an easy-to-use reporting facility, which can be pre-scheduled, giving me the time to concentrate on other business requirements! It has all the features an MSP needs at a very affordable price. Now I can focus on my customers without worrying about the software, features or prices.”

The economy, rising prices and how-do-you-keep-your-costs-low-question are helping managed services. Companies like ManageEngine make that process easier. What do you think? Do you think managed services in the help desk market will help? Have you thought of going the managed services route or are you already in the path? Let us know. We would love to hear your views.

Cloud-based IT Service Management pioneer, Service-now.com is holding their annual user conference titled “Knowledge” at San Diego on April 18 – 22, 2010 at the Omni San Diego Hotel. The 4th annual conference of the SaaS player will officially start on April 20, with pre-conference sessions happening on the days before. The agenda has not been fixed yet and the call for papers is on.

Last year’s user conference was attended by 300 people, most of them being customers and partners from the Service-now eco-system.

User conferences are a good thing. It brings customers together with both the company and fellow customers. They learn from each other’s experiences and strategies. The vendor gets the opportunity to talk about best practices that can be used in the product(s). Case studies help understand different perspectives to tackle a problem. It can also be a great place for solution providers and partners to highlight their presence and expertise.

Some of the topics that could be covered in Service-now’s conference include:

• Creating a service catalog
• Designing an effective CMDB
• Workflow Automation
• Adopting ITIL v.3
• The full list is here.

I checked with Service-now and they have opened the conference to other vendors and speakers – it is not just restricted to people using/deploying Service-now. That is a good thing because finally the customer benefits.

Other interesting shows that you may be interested in going are:
- HDI’s 2010 Annual Conference and Expo – March 16 – 19, 2010 at Orlando Florida (http://www.thinkhdi.com/hdi2010/)
- Forrester’s Infrastructure & Operations Forum 2010 – March 17-18, 2010 at Dallas, Texas (http://www.forrester.com/events/eventdetail?eventID=2436)
- Interop Las Vegas – April 25 – 29, 2009 (http://www.interop.com/lasvegas/)

More details on upcoming events can be found on our events page.

IT management has become an integral part of any enterprise and the choices that are available out there make it easy for any IT team to keep watch. Vendors like IBM, BMC from the Big 4 league and solutions from the point-product vendors like IpSwitch, Solarwinds, ManageEngine etc. have given IT across the globe the ability to keep track of what is happening in their bedrooms! These tools also become important for the IT support team during incident management or problem management.

Some of these tools have integration for mobile devices, where you can keep track of your infrastructure from your mobile devices. But I recently came across a company that talks about infrastructure management from the mobile device only. RoveIT is a Canada-based company who, as they put it, “helps IT administrators resolve incidents faster, reduce network downtime and maximize IT efficiencies”. They help manage IT infrastructure via mobile devices.

How does RoveIT do it? They have two components – Rove Mobile Admin Server and the Rove Mobile Client. The server component is installed on a server within the enterprise network that connects to the different pieces of the IT infrastructure – servers, network components and services. The Rove Mobile Client is installed on the mobile device and connects to the Admin Server to get information. They seem to have built support for most mobile platforms including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone. The iPhone support was their latest addition into the Rove IT management family. VPN is not required for the connection.

They package it into two packages – basic and advanced. The basic package can be used if you are looking at general Windows management, remote access and basic networking functions. Other platforms and services can be managed in the advanced edition. If you are looking at comprehensive incident management, you may be better off looking at the advanced edition.

Even though the iPhone interface looks better, the company says that the Blackberry option is more popular. That is no surprise considering the high penetration of Blackberry in the enterprise.

Rove IT started out in 2001 and claim to have more than 2500 customers worldwide. Pricing starts at US$295 for the basic edition and $595 for the advanced edition.

This is interesting. I just made my post yesterday about Social Networking and the help desk and I hear about a vendor who has integrated some sort of social media into a help desk software product. In this case, ManageEngine integrated Twitter with the customer help desk software.

A little background first. When customers feel satisfied or frustrated, they generally vent out their feelings and opinions by calling support or emailing them. If they don’t get any response, they blog about their experiences. With Twitter, it just became easier. 140 characters is all it takes to capture the attention of an enterprise like Dell or Southwest. The Twitter revolution took enterprises by surprise when they were dragged into conversations they never initiated. The 140 characters customers and prospects were tweeting was all over the place and companies found themselves closely monitoring social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn to see what people were saying about them.

Companies like Comcast, Southwest and Dell have been known for tracking conversations in social media that involve their products or brand and responding to these users appropriately. If it is praise, a simple thank-you from the company can go a long way. But when addressing a complaint or an issue, the company can put out the flame before it becomes a fire.

But how do customer service departments keep track of such tweets? You can either hire someone to keep a watch on Twitter 24×7 and there are tools that can help you do that too (like Tweetdeck and Seesmic). But these tools don’t keep track (store) of these customer outbursts (not in all cases). So it made sense for customer support software to keep track of these tweets. That is exactly what ManageEngine is trying to do. ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus is a web-based customer support help desk software with request management, contact management, knowledge base, self service portal and remote control. The new version of SupportCenter Plus integrates with Twitter to keep track of relevant conversations that are happening on the social media platform.

Vinu Sreedharan, product manager at ManageEngine said in the company press release, “The new features in this release will help customer service departments reduce that time and increase overall effectiveness.  We have seen ManageEngine SupportCenter Plus transform customer help desk departments and the new enhancements are really our response to customer feedback. We are excited about the new Twitter integration as it allows not just the customer service department to keep track of questions but can also greatly aid organizations in their need to keep track of public image and branding.”

The new software helps support organizations identify and keep track of relevant conversations about their products and/or company. I personally think this is important because channels of communication have really opened up in today’s connected world. Keeping track of all your customer engagements is important and it is just a matter of time, when more vendors are going to integrate these channels into their offerings. This is going to benefit companies and enterprises keep track of all that the customers are saying wherever they are saying it. The best part is that end users are open to use any channel of communication they want and they can expect better customer service from organizations.

Pricing for the new software from ManageEngine starts at US$495 for two support reps.

How is Twitter affecting your organization? Are you seeing your customers use new social media to communicate across to you? If yes, what are you doing about it? Let us know in the comments below.

HDI Announces the 2009 Annual Practices & Salary Report, Presents an Overall Look at the State of the IT Support Industry

HDI, the world’s largest membership association for help desk and IT service and support professionals and the premier certification body for the industry, today announced the 2009 Annual Practices & Salary Report, a comprehensive study that presents an overall look at the state of the IT support industry. The report shows that the technical support industry is working hard to maintain its commitment to the service and support of end-users and customers, despite the difficult economic backdrop.

“The Annual Practices & Salary Report takes a deep dive into the state of the service and support industry. It offers an inside look at support centers’ practices used throughout the industry which assists managers and directors to validate existing practices, showcases new ideas for improving methods and procedures in support centers and also provides a set of data to which support centers can benchmark against,” said Rich Hand, HDI Executive Director of Membership. “Given the world’s current economic climate, support centers are working hard to maintain their commitment to the industry and meet the needs of their customers.”

The study was conducted with 1,053 participants from 11 industries between May and July 2009 from the United States, Australia, Canada, India and Philippines. The results illustrate behaviors and opinions of support centers in a wide array of industries, sizes, and organizations that range from local to international. The report is broken down into six categories, including Incident Management; Support Tools; Process, Procedures, and Strategies; Performance Metrics; Training, Certification, and Satisfaction; and Salaries.

Report highlights include:

• Even though support centers in general do not appear to be supporting more customers, the large majority of support centers continue to see an increase in their number of incidents. The leading contributor to increased incidents, once again, is attributed to changes in infrastructure and/or products.
• Self-help tools are the primary implementation initiative for 13 percent of support centers. This is up from 10 percent in 2008.
• The telephone continues to be the leading communication channel for incident management, followed by email. One-third of support centers respond to email incidents between 15 minutes and one hour and over one-third respond between one and four hours. Additionally, 70 percent of incidents are resolved with two or less email exchanges and fewer e-mail incidents are being converted to phone support than in 2008.
• The number of support centers whose employees are receiving bonuses is down five percent. Still, there are 19 percent of support centers whose management receives bonuses and 45 percent whose management and staff receive bonuses.
• Fewer support centers are outsourcing services in all areas except for one, hardware support and repair. The top reasons support centers are not outsourcing more are due to concerns about control of service, service quality, customer acceptance and then cost.
• Support managers foresee both hiring freezes and salary freezes in their support organizations. This is up 21.4 percent and 23.6 percent, respectively from 2008.
• Although the primary training focus for new hires is product knowledge, customer service remains the number one area that support staffs are being trained in overall. The Computer industry is currently providing the most training for its IT support staffs while Manufacturing and Retail provide very little.
• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) seems to be particularly popular in Australia as well as large support centers and with those who provide internal support. Forty-three percent of support organizations are currently using or implementing ITIL and 21 percent are planning to implement some part of it.
• Sixty-five percent of support centers said that there is no direct charge to their customer for support services. This is up 5 percent from 2008.
• Sixty-three percent of support centers currently use Knowledge Management Software, while 20 percent are planning to add it. In addition, over 13 percent of support centers are calling it their primary initiative for tool implementation.
• While many support centers are embracing collaborative tools such as Share Point (30 percent) and Wikis (17.4 percent), they do not widely use social networking tools such as blogs, Linked IN, Twitter, Face Book, or My Space to provide support.

For more information about HDI or the 2009 Practice & Salary Report, contact HDI Executive Director of Marketing Allison Wroe, 719-785-5355, awroe@thinkhdi.com; or visit http://www.thinkhdi.com.

About HDI

HDI, a Think Services company, is the world’s largest IT service and support membership association and the industry’s premier certification and training body. Guided by an international panel of industry experts and practitioners, HDI is the leading resource for help desk/support center emerging trends and best practices. HDI provides members with a vast repository of resources, networking opportunities and the largest industry event – the HDI Annual Conference and Expo. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., USA, HDI offers training in multiple languages and countries. For more information, visit http://www.thinkhdi.com or call +1 719.268.0174.

About Think Services

Think Services connects specialized communities worldwide using educational events, consulting, training, certification, membership, and innovative media. Providing comprehensive opportunities for people to learn from, network with, and inspire each other, Think Services builds strong brands and works within communities to foster a unique affinity with its products and services. The division’s flagship products include the Game Developers Conference, the Webby Award-winning Gamasutra.com, Game Developer magazine, the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), and HDI. Think Services is a subsidiary of United Business Media, a global media and marketing services company with a market capitalization of more than $1.6 billion. To learn more, visit www.think-services.com.

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?

AUSTIN, Texas – (Business Wire) Spiceworks™, Inc. released a new plug-in for its free social IT management software application, which enables IT professionals to automatically regulate the power consumption of networked computers. The downloadable Power Manager plug-in – developed in cooperation with Intel Corporation – is designed to link everyday network and systems management tasks with green IT initiatives. Spiceworks estimates that if half its 800,000 users worldwide deploy the new power management plug-in, they could save more than $500 million in annual electricity costs and eliminate 3 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Currently more than 28 million desktops, laptops and servers are managed by the free Spiceworks IT Desktop.

“Building more energy-efficient PCs and devices is only one step in making IT green,” said Scott Abel, co-founder and CEO of Spiceworks. “The software that manages networked devices can also play a more active role in saving energy. Today with the help of Intel, we’ve tuned the Spiceworks IT Desktop software to do just that so our growing network of businesses can do more to save money and help the environment.”

The new power management plug-in can be downloaded for free from the Spiceworks Plug-in Center at http://community.spiceworks.com/plugin/172 and includes the following features:

* Remote Power Consumption Management – allows users to remotely manage the power consumption of PCs, laptops, and other networked devices. This includes the ability to use Wake On LAN and Intel® vPro™ technology features to power-on and -off devices based on schedules and other criteria;
* Power Management Dashboard – shows a visual map of networked machines and devices that are powered on or off; and
* Dollar Savings View – displays estimates of dollars saved per day and month based on current price/kwh and watts used by networked devices.

“Many organizations are adding environmental sustainability goals to their constant search for new opportunities to be socially responsible and to save money,” said Rick Echevarria, vice president and general manager, Intel Business Client Platforms. “Our collaboration with Spiceworks to develop the Power Manager plug-in for Intel® Core™2 processors with vPro™ technology-based PCs, provides businesses a cost-efficient way to more carefully and actively manage the valuable energy consumed by their IT networks.”

The Spiceworks IT Desktop is a free social IT management application that’s used by over 800,000 IT professionals and 75,000 managed service providers (MSPs) worldwide to automatically inventory, monitor, troubleshoot, report on and run a help desk for IT networks. It is the first business application to embed crowdsourcing, social networking and community collaboration features directly into an IT professional’s daily workflow. Currently Spiceworks is used in 196 countries worldwide to support 26 million employees and manage 40 million technology devices.

More information on Spiceworks can be found at www.spiceworks.com. Follow Spiceworks on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spiceworks. To connect with Spiceworks on Facebook visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spiceworks/15382903707.

About Spiceworks

Founded by network and systems management software pioneers, Spiceworks develops the first free social IT management application that incorporates crowdsourcing to help over 800,000 businesses and 75,000 managed service providers (MSPs) simplify everything IT. Spiceworks makes it easy for IT pros to manage their networks, collaborate to solve technology problems, and find the best practices, products and services they need day-to-day. Through its Voice of ITTM market research program, the company also publishes data on important technology usage, staffing and purchasing trends by small and medium businesses worldwide. Spiceworks is a privately held company headquartered in Austin, Texas with funding from Austin Ventures and Shasta Ventures. For more information visit www.spiceworks.com.

Spiceworks and Voice of IT are trademarks of Spiceworks, Inc. All other names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

For Spiceworks
Karl Scholz, 512-493-0909
karl.scholz@virtualprdirector.com

Combination of Modern SaaS and PinkVERIFY Designation Provides Customers With Unrivaled ITSM Tool Purchasing Confidence

SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwire – July 16, 2009) – Service-now.com, the pioneer of modern SaaS for IT service automation, today announced the achievement of PinkVERIFY status for support of eleven IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes. The designation is only applied to IT service management (ITSM) tools objectively assessed by Pink Elephant as meeting the functional requirements for ITIL compatibility.

“Service-now.com has shown a commitment to IT best practice with the PinkVERIFY certification,” said David Ratcliffe, President of Pink Elephant. “ITIL is recognized today as the most credible framework from which companies can align their processes and procedures. With this certification, Service-now.com now offers customers and prospects an extra level of assurance that their SaaS application for IT service management meets the industry ’stamp of approval’ for ITIL compatibility.”

Service-now.com is the first enterprise IT service management application to be delivered via modern software-as-a-service (SaaS). Service-now.com invites people to try a live instance of the application at http://demo.service-now.com. No registration is required.

IT organizations considering Service-now.com can now look to PinkVERIFY, the live Service-now.com demo instance, and more than 280 existing customers to validate Service-now.com support for ITIL best practices.

According to the PinkVERIFY assessment, Service-now.com effectively supports ITIL activities and IT best practices for:

--  Incident management
--  Problem management
--  Knowledge management
--  Request fulfillment
--  Change management
--  Release and deployment
--  Service asset and configuration
--  Service level management
--  Service catalog management
--  Service portfolio management
--  Financial management

“Service-now.com has almost 300 happy customers today because they were able to test drive the car before buying it. Now, with the addition of PinkVERIFY, prospective Service-now.com customers have the equivalent of a Carfax report. Service-now.com is dedicated to transparency and simplicity in the IT service management tool-buying process. With Service-now.com, there are only pleasant surprises,” said Fred Luddy, Service-now.com CEO.

Pink Elephant is celebrating 20 years of ITIL experience — more than any other supplier. Operating through many offices across the globe, the company is the world’s number one supplier of ITIL and ITSM conferences, education and consulting services. For more information, please visit http://www.pinkelephant.com.

About Service-now.com

Service-now.com enterprise IT service automation software combines ITIL v3 process support, software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery, and Web 2.0 functionality to provide a flexible, intuitive and self-managing application. Service-now.com was founded by Fred Luddy, former CTO of Peregrine Systems and Remedy. The company is based in Solana Beach, Calif. and has more than 280 enterprise customers worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.service-now.com/.

Eastern Mountain Sports has chosen InfraDesk, On Demand Service Desk, to increase help desk application functionality not available in previous app TriActive

BEDFORD, MA, June 10, 2009 – Eastern Mountain Sports, a leading outdoor retailer, has replaced their TriActive help desk application with InfraDesk, an On Demand Service Desk. By implementing InfraDesk, Eastern Mountain Sports has reduced infrastructure costs, adopted a streamlined workflow and integrated a complete knowledge base.

Key drivers for making the switch included the cost associated with an upcoming renewal of Eastern Mountain Sport’s existing TriActive help desk software in addition to the lack of functionality the software afforded specifically as it related to the workflow engine and knowledge base integration. InfraDesk provides a streamlined workflow that enables the ticket to move through a pre-defined path in a measureable and controlled manner. The integration of a Knowledge Base was also essential to Eastern Mountain Sports to enable accelerated issue resolution by providing the ability to query and record solutions.

“In addition to reducing our costs and removing our need to budget for renewals, InfraDesk will increase our productivity and time to resolution due to the integrated Knowledge Base. We expect to notice a significant uptick in the time to resolve issues as well as the time required for new hires to get acclimated to the system. This is a direct result of InfraDesk’s Knowledge Management module which enables our IT Support Agents to query solutions populated by historical data,” stated David Lemaire, Director of Information Technology Services, Eastern Mountain Sports. “The Adaptive Workflow Engine within InfraDesk has also streamlined the movement of our tickets by driving the action based on the user’s role and the content within the ticket.”

InfraDesk is delivered as a complete out-of-the-box ITIL-based Service Desk suite with built-in adaptive workflows which enables organizations to complete implementation in less than 30 days. In order for IT organizations to gain the full benefits upon implementation, InteQ takes a partner approach and provides training and consulting to organizations to successfully plan a roadmap for implementation and process improvements.

“Similar to stories we have heard from other clients, Eastern Mountain Sports had not recognized the capabilities, let alone the cost savings, that a SaaS-based application provided. We are pleased that InfraDesk has been an asset to them since implementation by enabling them to adopt a help desk solution that is both measurable and controlled,” Yash Shah, President & CTO, InteQ. “Our partnerships with our clients are what make them successful. Not only do we provide a tool that is cost effective, but we educate them on how to maximize its use to reach their individual goals.”

InfraDesk – an On Demand Service Desk Solution

InfraDesk is an On Demand Service Desk application delivered as a service over the web based on InteQ’s unique ITIL process automation approach. The simple and robust enterprise service desk solution provides the foundation for IT organizations Service Delivery and Operations to ultimately support overall Service Strategy. Through its Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, InfraDesk enables large organizations to eliminate costly maintenance upgrades and lengthy implementation cycles commonly associated with traditional software models while providing the affordability to small and medium-sized organizations without sacrificing functionality or flexibility. A complimentary demonstration of the product is available at http://www.inteqnet.com/id_tech_demo/id_tech_demo.html .

About InteQ

Founded in 1995, InteQ is a leader in on demand IT Service Management (ITSM), providing a comprehensive suite of managed services, an on-demand service desk solution, and award-winning training and consulting in ITIL – the IT Infrastructure Library. InteQ’s on demand solutions have been successfully implemented in over 90 countries through its global service delivery model with operations in the United States and India. For more information, visit www.inteqnet.com or contact 888.4IT.MGMT.

About Eastern Mountain Sports

Founded in 1967 by two New England rock climbers and based in Peterborough, N.H., Eastern Mountain Sports is one of the nation’s leading outfitters of outdoor gear, clothing, footwear and accessories with 64 retail stores in 12 states. Eastern Mountain Sports designs and sells products for outdoor adventurers who participate in a variety of sports, such as mountaineering, backpacking, camping, hiking, adventure racing, climbing, kayaking, mountain biking and snow sports. Eastern Mountain Sports product and technology is tested by its product development and quality assurance teams in conjunction with the Eastern Mountain Sports Climbing, Kayaking and Ski Schools. More information is available at www.ems.com.

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InteQ Corporation, InteQ and the InteQ logo are registered trademarks of InteQ Corporation. All other product and company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only and may be property of their respective owners.

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.