BMC Remedyforce Service Desk Solution is the Fastest-Growing SaaS Platform, Significantly Outpacing Competitive Solutions

HOUSTON — BMC Software, the leader in IT Service Management (ITSM), today announced more than 100 enterprises have adopted its cloud-based Remedyforce Service Desk solution in 300 days, making it the fastest growing SaaS-based IT management solution in the industry.

Enterprises such as Basic Energy, Canadian North, Iron Bow Technologies and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services are using the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution to automate their IT support process, from incident and change to analysis, while also reducing costs.

"Since 2007, there has been a strong growth in Gartner clients buying IT service desk tools utilizing the SaaS licensing and delivery model," said David Coyle, research vice president at Gartner. "The SaaS model for the IT service desk market is an attractive choice for several reasons, including the growth in the overall SaaS tool market, potential advantages around lower total costs, operating versus capital budget, predictability of costs, ease of implementation and the ease and timeliness of upgrades. However, the traditional perpetual licensing model is not going away. By 2015, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of all new IT service desk tool purchases will utilize the SaaS model."(1)

The business revolution being driven by the consumerization of IT has contributed to the Remedyforce Service Desk solution’s rapid adoption. As a cost-effective option for the modern IT support environment that also improves total cost of ownership, Remedyforce provides easy access to a breadth of capabilities, as well as a level of sophistication in ITSM that many organizations may have previously considered out of reach. Salesforce.com’s Force.com cloud platform enables consumer-friendly capabilities, such as mobility, and includes more sophisticated capabilities, such as visual tooling, that enable straightforward configuration without requiring IT support teams to learn a new skill – making the alignment of the Remedyforce Service Desk solution to the needs of the organization a matter of configuration not customization.

"We previously relied primarily on email for our help desk needs and, as expected, response times were slow and incidents were sometimes lost," said Corey Clark, IT systems manager, Basic Energy Services. "Remedyforce has proven to be an all-around efficient solution for our business needs, as we now leverage its incident, problem and change capabilities to manage our help desk activities. This has saved us time, money and has increased IT response times and employee productivity."

Consumers have unprecedented access to information on a growing number of devices at almost all times in their personal lives. This increased hyper-consumption of information is driving them to expect equal access in the workplace. In contrast to other offerings, the BMC Remedyforce platform supports the next generation requirements of the social enterprise with integrated social feeds, support for next-generation applications and mobility today.

"We chose Remedyforce to help us meet the growing demands of our service desk and enhance responsiveness to our customers and service network," said Lanre Omotayo, IT manager, Canadian North. "Overall, the platform will pay off generously, as there are no infrastructure costs and we can easily and consistently support remote users from anywhere, at any time."

"Remedyforce has helped IT departments of all sizes tap into the power of social and mobile cloud computing by providing the leading IT help desk app built on Force.com," said Ron Huddleston, senior vice president, ISV and Alliances, salesforce.com. "BMC and salesforce.com are committed to helping IT departments achieve greater success in the world of the social enterprise."

"With salesforce.com, we have created a unique solution that can help customers quickly address growing business trends, while also lessening their dependency on tying support personnel to the desktop. We are also giving them an easy-to-deploy option for replacing service desk products facing obsolescence," said Marc Ferrentino, CTO of SaaS, BMC. "We are pleased by Remedyforce’s popularity in the industry, which is the result of its ability to address the rapidly changing technology and business environment. Our nearest competitor took more than two years to reach the same level of adoption."

The BMC Remedyforce solution combines BMC’s 20-year proven record of experience, innovation and market leadership with salesforce.com’s proven cloud platform, Force.com. The result is the ultimate response to the needs of ITSM now and in the future. The BMC Remedyforce integration with Salesforce Chatter, enables users to communicate directly while addressing challenges. The solution is available on smartphones and tablets, allowing IT workers to respond anytime from anywhere to support their business stakeholders, and it is aligned to industry best practices.

About BMC Software

Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2011, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion. Visit www.bmc.com for more information.

Zuora Global Support Portal helps company streamline customer support, boosting response rate and delivering better visibility into customer issues

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and SAN FRANCISCO — Zuora, the subscription billing and commerce leader, and Zendesk, the proven cloud-based help desk software provider, today announced the launch of the Zuora Global Support Portal. The web-based support ticket application and self-service customer support platform, powered by Zendesk, is located at support.zuora.com.

"Zendesk has helped us increase our response rate, decrease our response times, and deliver new visibility into customer issues," said Marlene Summers, Senior Manager, Zuora Global Support. "Best yet, Zendesk makes our support agents excited about working on their tickets."

Through the portal, Zuora’s customers can stay up-to-date with announcements from the Zuora Global Support Team, get answers from the community, and share feature suggestions. In addition, the support system fully supports customer inquiries from the @ZuoraSupport Twitter handle through Zendesk’s innovative Twicket™ service.

"It is great to see Zuora take advantage of multiple channels such as the web, email and social media to deliver superior customer support," said Kate Hobbie, Zendesk’s Director of Customer Support. "Having more than 10,000 customers ourselves, our own support team understands the importance of delivering outstanding customer support through whatever means our customers choose to communicate with us."

Summers added, "There are so many things to love about Zendesk. With its GoodData integration, we inherit a robust set of reporting and analytics with literally one click. To integrate into our Engineering and Operations teams, we easily created custom widgets to serve as a communication vehicle. And, although Zendesk is very easy to set-up and use, it is sophisticated enough to handle our billing support needs."

About Zuora, Inc.

Zuora’s subscription billing and commerce platform changes the way subscription businesses manage and sell to customers, allowing them to bring new products to market in less time, with more flexibility and less hassle. Zuora customers are up and running within 90 days and often recognize 200% ROI within weeks. Zuora is built from the ground up by SaaS industry visionaries and veterans from salesforce.com, WebEx, Accenture, Google, eBay, Oracle and Vitria. Zuora customers include Reed Business Information, InsideView, Marketo, Ricoh, Box.net, Ning, Ustream, Informatica, Barrett Xplore and Open Range. To learn more about Zuora, please visit www.zuora.com.

About Zendesk

Zendesk is the leading provider of proven, cloud-based help desk software. For growing organizations, Zendesk is the fastest way to enable great customer service. More than 10,000 Zendesk customers, including Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, OpenTable and Groupon, trust Zendesk with their most valuable assets: their customers, partners, and employees. Founded in 2007, Zendesk is funded by Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.

In the last Dreamforce 2011 conference, a lot of emphasis was placed on the social profile within their Service cloud.  That is, having that user’s relevant Facebook and Twitter stream on the agent’s window.  Along with Data.com and Dun and Bradstreet, you can have accurate data from that user.

As well, Salesforce also recommends the monitoring of social media analytics with Radian6. 

But I feel we’re missing some key components in the call center.

I’ve been an advocate of a unified messaging system as I know a lot of calls or personal emails never make it to the CRM.

Let’s face it, customers will communicate with you when they want and how they want.  That may be by phone, fax, email, or text chat.    Some customers will vent out their frustrations indirectly via Twitter or Facebook.  (You better pray if that user doesn’t have over 1 million followers, because you don’t want bad press coming from person with influence.  Conversely, you’ll accept any kind of good press from this user!)

When choosing a CRM and Service Desk application, make sure you look at your organization and see what media outlet you use to connect with your customers, whether it’s built in or an add-on application.  And choose wisely.

Every media outlet has its time and place, and you have to staff your customer service agents accordingly.

In the video below, Lauren Carlson from Software Advice speaks with Sword Ciboodle’s VP of Marketing, Mitch Liberman and CEO of the Americas, Richard De Francisco, about the future of the call center.  It’s a great interview and overview of what I have been preaching, but you’ll have to ignore the background noise.  The video was shot from the CRM Evolution 2011 conference last August.  As you can hear, it was quite busy!

Here is the interview on YouTube:

I am starting to see a trend for companies using Radian6 and other social enterprise monitoring products.

Companies are responding to people’s complaints or queries directly through social media. Wake up everyone, it’s not the just the 1-800 Call Center anymore.

With social enterprise monitoring products, companies look for keywords such as their own company, other band names (i.e. competition), and mis-spelled names. By scraping the web, they find as many social media sites as possible to find negative and positive feedback.

The monitoring software allows them to drill down and find out exactly what people are saying or thinking about the company, good or bad.

By responding in real time, this helps improves the public perception of the company.

Success is making customers happy, one customer at a time. Hopefully, that customer will share their experience via Facebook and Twitter.  And that’s the power of spreading the message, virally.

The Facebook Fan Page

Another trend emerging with companies using social media monitoring tools are treating their Facebook Fan Page as serious as their own corporate web site.

Social media *is* an integrated marketing plan for any business.

By having a contest and engaging Facebook readers to “post on your wall” whether it’s a testimonial or uploading a video, that’s the community companies want to see.  And with 700 million users on Facebook, that’s a large sample pool to choose from.

But it doesn’t end there.  Eventually you’ll want to draw your readers to your web site and make those conversions.  Loyal  and repeat customers are the best customers.  I think everyone knows that.

Again, it doesn’t end there.  By using Heroku for Facebook, you can build real anything as a Facebook app, including a storefront from your goods, without even leaving the Facebook page.  Now you have two store fronts, one web and one Facebook.

What used to be a brick and mortar industry with real storefronts, sales clerks and cashiers changed with web ecommerce over a decade ago.  Now that revolution is changing.

However, will customer service agents and help desk call centers be a thing of the past?

LANDesk research reveals increased pressure on service desk managers to handle mobile devices

London — In an increasingly tech-savvy society, it is no surprise that users are becoming heavily reliant on mobile devices as business tools. New research* by LANDesk reveals 96 per cent of users view laptops, smartphones and tablets as not only beneficial but vital to productivity.

However, the role of the service desk in maintaining this influx of technology is overlooked, and consequently they are overloaded with calls to support mobile devices and under-equipped to deal with them. The survey found that a massive 76 per cent of service desks claim that the extra support required has had a negative impact. This is due to the fact that the uptake of new devices has necessitated a rapid accumulation of knowledge and expertise to support them.

The survey also revealed that even though 86 per cent of service desks have seen an increase in the number of mobile devices they are being asked to support, the majority of respondents were asked to support them before the service desk was ready, and only 57 per cent were consulted before the company procured mobile devices, causing a negative impact on the running of the service desk as a whole.

‘‘The inundation of service desks with these devices has resulted in undue strain. There is a belief that it is the duty of service desks to support mobile devices – yet they have little involvement in decisions that directly affect the service they can provide,’’ said Ian Aitchison, Director of Product Management, LANDesk. Moreover, the risks of data leaving the network as well as viruses and malware entering the network are also borne by the service desk, resulting in a dramatically increased workload.’’

The report indicates that the main issue is the lack of training provided to service desks, as mobile devices are difficult to support, mainly due to the sheer volume of different devices users are introducing, along with the growing trend of working remotely. 

‘‘The majority of service desks view mobile device usage as an inevitable and beneficial development within businesses– however it is clear that more support and consideration is due to service desks and their limitations,’’ Aitchison advises. ‘‘There must be specific policies, integrated solutions and training systems in place to keep up with the wealth of new technology in order for these devices to provide the greatest benefit to their users and the company.’’

About LANDesk Software

LANDesk Software is a leading provider of systems lifecycle management, endpoint security, and IT service management solutions for desktops, servers and mobile devices across the enterprise. LANDesk enables IT to deliver business value by gaining control of end-user computing with a single console, light infrastructure, and ITIL solutions that deliver significant ROI for thousands of customers worldwide. LANDesk is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with offices located in the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific, and can be found at www.landesk.com.

*The survey was conducted amongst service desk managers and incorporates findings from research LANDesk carried out with the SDI (Service Desk Institute). Click here for a full copy of the report.

SAN FRANCISCO — Zendesk, the proven cloud-based help desk software provider, today announced its new Zendesk Enterprise Plan, offering a fast, customizable, and secure customer support solution specifically designed for large, international, or multi-brand organizations. The new plan gives companies the ability to tailor their help desks according to their own needs while maintaining the highest levels of security. In addition, subscribers can provide unlimited internal usage through light agents, giving everyone in an organization the ability to collaborate internally on support issues.

Zendesk’s philosophy has always been that whether a company is a start up or a large multi-national organization, we will offer a variety of plans so that customers have the choice to pick the one that best meets their specific needs. As a result more than 10,000 customers in 100 countries have chosen Zendesk ranging from small and medium businesses such as Livescribe and Cloudera to large multi-national companies including Adobe and Sony Music.

In 2007, Zendesk started a revolution in customer service by allowing small and medium-sized companies to stay on top of any type of customer conversation including those through the web, email, social media, and more. For the first time, companies who loved their customers could also love their help desks. Today, Zendesk brings that revolution to the enterprise.

"Help desk needs vary from company to company. We’re always listening to customer feedback to fine tune our offerings to provide the best choice for all organizations, regardless of size," said Zack Urlocker, COO of Zendesk. "Zendesk has become the de facto standard for small and medium businesses. Our largest customers started asking for enterprise-grade features that provide sophisticated customization capabilities and added layers of security. We responded with Zendesk Enterprise."

New features available in Zendesk Enterprise Plan include:

• Unlimited Internal Usage: Organizations can now access and collaborate internally on support conversations through light agents without having to pay for additional seats. This new capability is a direct result of Zendesk’s large customers asking to enable company-wide insight into customer engagements.
• Multi-brand Help Desk: Parent companies with multiple brands can work efficiently by centralizing their support teams while maintaining multiple uniquely-branded customer facing support portals.
• Custom Agent Roles: Organizations can customize permission levels for a group of agents by allowing or restricting access to specific features within Zendesk, such as access to private comments or channels, or ability to change ticket fields.
• Business Rules Analysis: Companies can now analyze the performance of their business rules and support workflows.
• Network Restrictions: Administrators can restrict access to Zendesk by defining a range of IP addresses.
• Email Archiving: Customer support interactions can be automatically archived, making e-discovery and adherence to compliance regulations easier in case of audits or legal requests.
• Priority Support: Zendesk commits to respond to customer submissions in less than an hour, in addition to access to our agents by phone 24/7.

"At Box.net, we pride ourselves on our product’s simplicity, security and performance," said Jon Herstein, Box.net’s Vice President, Customer Success. "When looking for a help desk solution to meet the support needs of thousands of customers, we required the same. Zendesk has always offered simplicity and performance. With its new Enterprise plan, it now delivers the enterprise-grade features we require. And, with the plan providing unlimited usage by light agents without having to pay for additional seats, we are able to engage our entire company in the support process."

Zendesk Enterprise Plan is now available for $99 per agent per month on an annual subscription basis. To learn more about the Zendesk Enterprise Plan, visit http://www.zendesk.com/enterprise.

About Zendesk

Zendesk is the leading provider of proven, cloud-based help desk software. For growing organizations, Zendesk is the fastest way to enable great customer service. More than 10,000 Zendesk customers, including Adobe, MSNBC, Sony, OpenTable and Groupon, trust Zendesk with their most valuable assets: their customers, partners, and employees. Founded in 2007, Zendesk is funded by Charles River Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Matrix Partners. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.

Alliance of Cloud-Based Help Desk Providers Advocates for Open Standards

Dallas, TX – TeamSupport.com (http://www.TeamSupport.com) – an emerging leader in SaaS-based customer service and help desk tools – today announced their membership in NetworkedHelpDesk.org. The organization, a collaboration of similarly focused software providers, is committed to delivering a superior customer experience by creating seamless communication streams between the participating partners and suppliers.

"We are very pleased to join other industry leaders such as Atlassain, Service Now and ZenDesk in advancing the goals of NetworkedHelpDesk.org," said Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. "Our clients typically rely on specialized software tools from multiple vendors for their CRM, ticketing, bug-tracking and related customer support workflows. Participating in this initiative gives us the opportunity of contributing to standards and APIs for increased interoperability among complimentary products – that’s a "win-win" for TeamSupport and our customers."

Employed by customer support and corporate help desks worldwide, TeamSupport is easily configured and customized; the application is offered in several reasonably priced, upgradeable versions. TeamSupport is scalable from a simple help-desk application to a 100+ seat enterprise-wide customer support and product defect tracking system.

NetworkedHelpDesk.org members include top-tier developers of cloud-based products such as ticketing systems, bug trackers, knowledge bases, customer relationship management software, and more. Additional information may be found at NetworkedHelpDesk.org.

About TeamSupport

TeamSupport.com is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dallas, TX-based Muroc Systems, Inc. (http://www.MurocSystems.com), a holding company focused on developing productivity enhancing software products delivered via the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

California based innovator, Web Help Desk today announced that the Web Help Desk fully supports the newly released Apple operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. From its inception, the Web Help Desk established itself as the leading ITSM solution running on the Mac OS platform.

Web Help Desk’s centralized approach to ITSM simplifies the management of IT services in a heterogeneous environment, and provides portability across platforms when needed.

Fremont, California — Web Help Desk, a worldwide innovator in cross platform help desk software, announced today that the Web Help Desk fully supports the newly released Apple operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. From its inception, the Web Help Desk established itself as the leading ITSM solution running on the Mac OS platform. The Web Help Desk was the first service management solution to fully support Mac OS X on both the server and the client side.

"Remaining truly cross platform and vendor neutral is a key platform for us at Web Help Desk," said Terry Siddall, VP at Web Help Desk.  "Being able to support Lion from day one of its release assured our customers that they selected the help desk software committed to providing zero OS-lock and the peace of mind that Web Help Desk will not create a ‘legacy system’ scenario within their organization."

Web Help Desk’s centralized approach to ITSM simplifies the management of IT services in a heterogeneous environment, and provides portability across platforms when needed. Web Help Desk’s ability to run on all major operating systems and database servers ensures the software will keep pace with the latest technology trends.

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is supported across all Web Help Desk editions, including the Professional Edition, Lite Edition, and the Free Help Desk Software Edition.

Resources:

• Help Desk Software: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/
• Help Desk Software Demo: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/demo.html
• Download Help Desk Software: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/trial.html
• Free Help Desk Edition: http://www.webhelpdesk.com/free-help-desk-software.html

About Web Help Desk:

Founded in 1998, the Web Help Desk software suite is the leading cross-platform service desk management solution for ITSM professionals who seek to simplify and automate their increasingly complex service environments. The extensive feature set of Web Help Desk addresses critical IT service areas, including: Incident and Problem Management, Asset and Desktop Management, Knowledge Management, LDAP / AD Integration, and Change Management. Copyright (C) 2011 Web Help Desk. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries

I cannot stress the importance of a proper Helpdesk or Service desk implementation, preferable with ITIL.

There are way too many incidents that do not get logged properly in the system.  We call them “drive-by’s” (though this isn’t funny in some major US cities).  All incidents should be logged via an online web form, email, or telephone.

That being said, I can break down the top 7 issues that Helpdesk centers get on a regular basis, with the top 2 reason accounting for over 80% of ALL tickets.

1. forgotten passwords (especially with 2 factor authentication)
2. can’t access email, email not working (especially for those with mobile devices like Blackberry)
3. problems with connectivity to VPN
4. Hardware failure
5. Application problems
6. Slow PC, slow network, slow everything…
7. Printer not working

As you can see from the above list, you have a combination of incidents and problems.  And let’s not forget about the IT Cowboys who do changes on the server which can result in these incidents and problems in the first place!

That is why you need ITIL ready functionalities: Incident management, Problem management, Change management and Configuration management database.

But it’s not as simple as that, either.

Why?

Here is my take on the top 3 issues for helpdesk departments:

1. Having no or poor knowledge of customers
2. Managing the complexity of change
3. The pressure to handle increased call volumes, faster, across multiple departments in different time zones.

The 3rd item is the important one, and a proper helpdesk software can be the key to the success of your department and overall respect and reputation for the IT department.

It’s also an item that you have full control over, and making the right choice in software is important, whether you choose an on premise solution or a cloud based solution.

To be continued…

LiveTime’s integration with ZENworks, eDirectory and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server provides Novell with best of breed Cloud based ITIL Service Management solution.

Newport Beach, CA –– LiveTime Software, a leading provider of Web, SaaS, and Cloud based ITIL 3 Service Management (ITSM) and Service Desk software, today announced an agreement with Novell for worldwide distribution of LiveTime as Novell Service Desk. The product will be generally available on November 11.

“LiveTime is committed to Open Standards and provides the perfect infrastructure for Request, Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management. LiveTime’s integrations, performance, and scalability made it an obvious choice to support Novell’s enterprise customer base,” said Rick Carlson, Director of Product Management at Novell.

LiveTime has been able to transform organizations’ customer service into agile, knowledge-based service delivery using ITIL v3 best practices. By removing the complex customization and training normally associated with ITIL solutions, customers are able to implement LiveTime within a matter of weeks not months.

LiveTime is pre-integrated with Novell ZENworks Configuration Management (ZCM) 10 and 11, ZENworks Desktop Management 6.5 or later, ZENworks Asset Management 6.5 or later, as well as eDirectory and closed loop email management with Groupwise 6, 7, and 8. This comprehensive integration allows customers to leverage their existing infrastructure for immediate ROI and improved customer service. In addition, LiveTime integrates with Novell’s Identity Manager 4 and runs on all editions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Available On Demand (SaaS) or On Premise (software, hardware or virtual appliance), LiveTime is based on open standards and supports any operating system, any browser, and any database. LiveTime is used by many global 2000 companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Wellpoint.

About LiveTime Software

Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, LiveTime Software, Inc. is a vendor of Web 2.0, Open Standards based ITIL service management (ITSM), help desk and support software for medium to large enterprises such as Verizon, Wellpoint, Pricewaterhouse Coopers and the United States Department of Defense. Founded in 1999, LiveTime Software is a privately held firm with offices in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. For more information visit www.livetime.com