Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has become wildly popular across a broad spectrum of vertical markets due to its cost effectiveness, flexibility and general ease of use. However in the IT service management (ITSM) realm, this isn’t always the case and companies using SaaS solutions for their service desks can quickly become frustrated with deploying and managing their offerings.
CA Technologies has announced a solution geared toward MSPs and other providers requiring a simple and easy to maintain and manage SaaS-based ITSM offering. The company has made enhancements to its CA Cloud Service Management solution, making it a mobile-ready offering that is designed to simplify deployment and customization so that users can be up in running in weeks instead of months.
According to CA, the upgrades are a direct result of some of the most common complaints among SaaS ITSM users. Too often, MSPs and other service providers make the move to SaaS-based ITSM solutions and find that customization and integration are major problems requiring significant development time and money to remedy. Initial deployment can also be a hassle, and managing the solution often requires the same amount of staff as traditional, on premises offerings.
CA hopes to eliminate some of those headaches and challenges with its updated offering. Features include an intuitive interface and mobile capabilities that enable end users to easily request support and services from their providers. The CA Cloud Service Management solution also offers drag-and-drop workflows and dynamic in-app guidance to speed up the initial setup. It includes self-service reporting and dashboards as well as asset management and discovery to automate and streamline processes as much as possible.
The solution has been in beta testing since last month and for MSP CSS Corp., the upgrades have been beneficial. “As an MSP, a key factor to our success with the platform has been its usage simplicity and 'less than one full-time employee' approach to configuration, deployment and on-going management,' said Nathan Unsworth, EUC practice lead at CSS.
Carey Blunt, global service desk chief architect at Fujitsu, was initially hesitant about the upgraded solution but found it eliminates much of the traditional, rote, time-consuming development work required for most ITSM implementations. “CA Cloud Service Management is functionally-rich and easy-to-implement, with standardized and preconfigured ITMaaS capabilities that breathe fresh air into the ITSM market.”
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
