A growing number of IT organizations are seeking a new generation of IT Service Management (ITSM) applications to help them monitor and manage their IT services from within a hybrid environment of on-premise and cloud services, according to a survey released last week.
The survey, conducted by consulting firm THINKstrategies in conjunction with industry vendor FrontRange, found that the fast adoption of cloud solutions within the enterprise has further complicated the task of IT service management. The survey, conducted between December 2012 and January 2013, draws its data from 341 participants within organizations of all different sizes and a variety of industries worldwide.
The key findings included the following:
Although 72.7 percent of respondents currently rely on legacy on-premise ITSM solutions to address their needs, but only 13.5 percent said that they are “very satisfied” with the delivery method of their current ITSM solution — an almost equal proportion stated that they are “dissatisfied” with said delivery method.
One-third of respondents reported that the primary driver behind changing their ITSM solutions is to better align IT with the business. More than a quarter of those surveyed also cited improved ease-of-use as a key factor in such a decision.
More than half of the respondents categorized their organizations as being at the first level of ITSM maturity—in which organizations utilize a basic offering of IT help desk tools including incident, problem, inventory and knowledge management and reporting. Only a little more than a third of the respondents (35.5 percent) are at the second level of maturity, in which organizations take advantage of an expanded range of IT services including change management, self-service, service request and SLA management.
Fewer than 10 percent of survey respondents are at the highest level of maturity and using service virtualization, release governance, social IT management, analytics and reporting and mobility management tools.
“Scores of organizations are committed to improving their ITSM capabilities and maturity levels,” said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director, THINKstrategies. “However, many are finding that traditional, on-premise solutions do not always provide the best value when applied across the whole of the organization. There are many instances where a cloud delivery method provides a level of cost-effectiveness and functionality that simply cannot be matched by legacy offerings.”
CLO Inside Track: This survey illustrates the challenges facing IT managers as the hybrid public-private cloud market heats up. It’s important to remember that hybrid ITSM does more than simply support the cloud – it provides a solid foundation to support both cloud-based and premise-based applications holistically. With the vast majority of enterprises expected to employ a hybrid model for at least the foreseeable future, having the essential tools in place to manage those blended environments is a must.
(For more information visit www.thinkstrategies.com.)
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