CERN Delivers People-Centric Service Management Using Service-now.com

CERN, being one of the world’s most respected centres for scientific research, and now also a Service-now.com success story represents the essence of what we see Service-now.com as being.  A solution that drives people-centric service management through improved efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

As with our own implementation, CERN are benefiting from the hugely beneficial service-culture that a Service-now.com solution is able to create.

Read the full press release here…

Tips on choosing IT Management solutions

Here are 3 high-level tips on choosing solutions for your IT Management.   These are aimed at the not-so-versed IT manager, senior manager, business owner or entrepreneur looking to expand his business and with it establish a more mature IT environment…

1.       Start by defining or at least understanding [fully] what the business or IT process is.   If you don’t understand the process – you can’t properly identify the broader problem and how that problem can potentially be solved. In the world of IT (or IT Management), make sure you’re working according to some model and broader vision – whether that be by adopting an FCAPS model, the Meta Group model for E/DSM, your own proprietary model or simply by aligning to ITIL guidelines for managing your processes.  Whatever your preference, you have to work towards a model.

2.       Choose software or solution components that will contribute to the solution you intend to adopt.  Choosing a solution is not just about choosing a good piece of software, hardware or service.   You must take some time to understand the vendor and supplier of choice.   You should take into consideration their culture, their success (and reputation) in the market, satisfaction of existing customers and whether they could get maximum value from solutions they’ve purchased.   You should look at how the local partners are empowered to support you, how willing they are to understand your needs and grow with you.   Most importantly, choose a partner that will support you through the tough times, a partner that’s knowledgeable and can give you the appropriate advise, a partner that puts your interests before his (i.e. your business objectives) because he realizes that he’ll only be successful if your business is successful.    When making your buying decision – consider all these aspects – and spend time developing a relationship so that you can actually gain an understanding of these aspects.

3.       Lastly, it’s important to consider what your definition of a solution is.  Many people have a wrong perception – partly due to vendors selling “solutions” when all they’re selling is software or hardware.   Ask yourself “when is a solution a solution?”.   A solution is note something that comes in a box.  It’s not something you buy and now have to wonder what you’re going to do with it.  You only have a solution when the software, hardware, service and whatever else you purchase is fully implemented, integrated, supported and utilized (i.e. users are empowered and educated), and when it is adding maximum value according to your original definition of the problem that needed to be solved.

To sum this up, a solution must support a process that solves a business problem, it must be integrated into existing systems and you should have a partner supporting you to gain maximum value from your investment so that you can focus your efforts on your own business and your customers’ businesses.

The direct benefits

So the technology is great and the concepts are fresh, but what are the direct benefits to our customers if they use our services/solutions?

Here’s a concise list of real benefits:

Benefit No 1:    Simplification, simplification, simplification…..

This is perhaps a bit of an abused cliche, but with our solutions – your life as a CIO or CTO, IT director, IT manager, IT Engineer, service desk administrator or operator or even just an IT user – becomes simpler, more efficient and easier on a daily basis.  The typical IT environment has become so complex and all the systems needed to monitor and manage the infrastructure and associated services associated – along with the governing processes (i.e. ITIL) have resulted in a huge jumble of integrated point solutions and complex software models and architectures.
We’ve taken a fresh approach that has enabled us to essentially replace the entire management layer (Enterprise Systems Management + IT Service Management) with a simple integration of two of the most innovative and practical solutions to enter the IT management space in decades.  (Service-now.com for ITSM and Monolith Software for ESM).   Add to the fresh technical approach the fact that these solutions are offered as a service, and a huge amount of effort and skills required for [essentially] non-core services are taken off your shoulders.

Benefit No 2:   Cost savings…

(I might as well say cliche no 2.)  As a direct result of the simplification explained above – huge cost savings can be had.  First of all, ALL of the solutions that we offer as Marutech fall into the category of:  “On Demand” or “Software as a Service” or “Cloud Computing” or “Managed Service” or “Subscriptions” or “Off Balance Sheet”  – choose your buzz-word (carefully, as there’s often strong internal resistance to over-used buzz-words in the market), but we do not sell you software licenses and hardware that you need to worry about.   Everything we do is focused on zero capital expenditure (CAPEX) while drastically optimizing your long-term operational costs (or OPEX).   But besides that, there’s the direct cost savings achieved due to lower operational overhead, fewer complexities, increased productivity and performance, lower maintenance costs, fewer contractors and specialist skills, etc…   These result in real cost savings…

Benefit No 3:  Improved Customer Service, Performance, Morale, Productivity, etc.
Quite incredibly – the customers that have migrated from their legacy systems to Service-now.com and/or Monolith-Software are experiencing such elation and enthusiasm with their decisions that the only people we see moaning and groaning about these technologies are the (non-customer) late adopters and bigots that can’t let go of the empires they’ve built using the legacy solutions…  Virtually every customer I know of that has made the move, have re-energized teams, staff and particular managers and of course improved customer service and productivity levels. They all seem to be in jovial moods with huge weights being lifted from their shoulders since ditching the legacy systems.   Every single one of them seems to be eager to share the great success stories…

I could ramble on and get into a lot of detail, but at a high level – these 3 benefits really stand out as the primary impacting benefits on customers that have adopted either of our 2 core solutions.

What is Service-now?

So here’s a a pitch on Service-now.com for the uninitiated. This is most certainly not the best, most comprehensive or only angle to consider, but I tried to touch on many of the aspects that local business in South Africa are concerned with and areas that I believe need real consideration.

As Marutech we have a few great products that enables you to offer better IT services while cutting costs and Service-now.com (SNC) is our flagship product that is taking the world by storm.  SNC has in fact shown exponential growth over the past 5 years – reaching the $50m revenue mark even quicker than Salesforce.com.

Service-now.com is a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) solution and more.  In fact, it’s been seen more and more as an ERP for IT due to all the great features that are being added such as Project and Portfolio Management, Sale Force Automation, Runbook Automation, Development Lifecyle Management, etc. – far more than a just an ITSM solution. It competes directly with your current Remedy, HP Service-Manager, CA Service Desk or Frontrange HEAT solutions.  The great advantage of this solution is

that it was developed purely as an internet based service (i.e. Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) and is thus an off-balance sheet solution to which you subscribe on an annual basis rather than having to purchase licenses and hardware which you have to then maintain yourself.  The fact that it’s web2.0 type design allows you to access it from anywhere and at any time using virtually any browser (including smart-phones) is just an added bonus and adds great value to all your IT users.

Service-now.com has been replacing legacy systems worldwide at an astonishing rate (see attached competitive snapshot) because people are after solutions that are simpler, easier and best practice aligned – solutions that offer similar or better features, flexibility, customizability and benefits that legacy vendors just can’t match.  The amount of time and resources required to maintain or enhance existing legacy systems is costing more than what the systems [sometimes] seem to be worth, hence, the advantage of using a robust solution to which you simply subscribe.

I encourage you to review this solution before renewing maintenance or spending more time and effort on your current system.

Core Functionality

Service-now.com currently offers eleven Pink Elephant verified ITIL (v3) modules (i.e. Incident, Change, Problem, etc) and a whole bunch more – all inclusive of the subscription.  You can choose to enable each functional area as your organization matures and needs arise to utilize additional processes.

Architectural [default] features that most can’t afford in legacy systems include full disaster recovery, 3-5 different instances (depending on your size) so that you can separate your development and test platforms from production, numerous integrations and a high level of security and even encryption of the data if required.

Services Considerations

Probably the biggest differentiator to legacy solutions is the reduced effort (resources and time) to get the system going, aligned to business requirements and keeping it running.  The intuitive interface and ease of use means that customers are sometimes up and running and fully functional in a matter of weeks rather than months (or even years).   Service-now.com manages all hardware and software components so the effort, resources and risk of managing the systems, upgrades, etc yourself are all taken away.   As an example of the value of a great architecture, Service-now.com did the last upgrade of over 1500 instances (spring release) in under 2 days – with zero failures.   Service-now.com has been going since 2004, they releases 4 upgrades a year and continue to add great new features with virtually every upgrade.

Case Studies

Some of the world’s largest and most famous organizations are using Service-now.com including Facebook, New York Stock Exchange, Google, PWC, Hyatt Corporation, Pepsi, VeriSign, Myspace, Best Buy, Deutsche Bank, Juniper, Cisco…   the list just goes on.   In 5 years, Service-now.com have gained over 490 customers globally and are currently signing up between 5 and 10 new customers every week – this says a huge amount about the success of the product and the need out there for a fresh approach.

Costing Overview

The pricing model couldn’t be simpler.   Pricing is based on a subscription per process-user per year.  (specifically process users –  self-service users and people simply logging or monitoring their requests are at no cost).  The only ‘other’ component that is priced separately is the discovery option which requires the installation of a ‘probe’ in your environment and which will help with effectively populating the CMDB if you don’t have that info.  Discovery option pricing is currently based on the number of servers you have, but this is possibly subject to change in the near future.

The biggest consideration however with regards to cost remains the long-term value and savings achieved in reduced resources needed to maintain, develop and support the system.  This is where most organizations really see huge benefits.

To wrap up…

If you have more time to explore this, I’d encourage you to visit the website: www.service-now.com.   You could even go as far as getting your helpdesk manager or team to test the look and feel of the solution on the global demo instance (but be aware that others may also be playing around on it so you might find some funnies appearing.  This instance is reset one a day at 12:00 SA Time back to defaults.)

If this sounds good – you’d be right.  It’s a great product and Service-now.com are a great vendor to work with.

If you have any queries – please feel free to contact us on +2711 287 1501.