CA World: CA unifies service desk

Software vendor CA today unveiled a unified service desk management product, at the same time as introducing a set of tools to help speed deployment and adoption.

It said the move to combine software components commonly sold by vendors into three separate, but unified products met end user demands for a more holistic approach to managing IT incidents and availability.

Brian Bell, senior vice president and general manager for CA service management told CA World delegates that this new holistic approach was driving top-line revenue growth that outstripped that of the overall market three to one.

“Customers are moving from highly customised packages to the end-to-end, holistic products offered by CA as part of a new wave of interest in service management,” he said. “With our offering, customers need only buy one licence.”

The three main, new products - CA Service Desk Manager r12, CA IT Client Manager and CA IT Asset Manager – are claimed to address three main issues faced by IT organisations.

Bell said bringing capabilities related to automating business service tasks and process flows across incident, problem, knowledge, change and configuration management database (CMDB) processes into CA Service Desk Manager r12 would simplify the procurement of these integrated features traditionally sold as point products.

He also said the unification of such features within fewer separate products would ease total cost of ownership-related challenges around integration, end-user training, adoption and driving increased productivity.

Having identified these issues as key to service management development, CA also today introduced a set of tools it said would help accelerate service desk deployments, user training and integration with other business service software components.

CA Green Books have been designed to provide users with an online repository of repeatable, best practice deployment and integration tips, including sample environment setup and configurations. While CA Deployment Playbooks for IT service management offer repeatable design-to-final training implementation guides.

IT organisations have realised how difficult it can be to know if a change caused an incident, for example, when their change and incident management databases never meet, according to Kris Brittain, research vide president at analyst Gartner.

“Comprehensive, full-function solutions will become the industry norm,” she said.

Click here to read more coverage from CA World 08.

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