CA Technologies Debuts Latest Version of Service Desk SaaS

CA Technologies has released CA Nimsoft Service Desk 7 (NSD7), its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, for helping IT departments manage help desk requests.

The company displayed components of NSD7 at Fusion 2012 last October. The main difference in this latest version is an interface designed for people who have never been trained to request IT services or initiate a service call.

“Users who have become accustomed to consumer applications that require no learning expect the same from enterprise applications,” explained Lokesh Jindal, general manager of Service and Portfolio Management at CA Technologies.

NSD7 utilizes an interface that mimics social media applications and consumer websites. The intuitive look makes placing requests simple and creates more cooperative relationships between end users and IT staff.

An IT staff member’s assigned projects and exchanges with end users, for example, are displayed in a social media feed. Employee service requests look like posts to an IT staff member’s wall.

When staff members click on the employee ticket, they see the employee’s profile, past service desk interactions and current hardware profile. Individuals in IT can then follow the ticket from inception to completion, including viewing actions and chats associated with the ticket.

If the IT staff member doesn’t know what to do, he or she can search the Knowledge Base or initiate a chat with another staffer who may have dealt with a similar problem. Action-driven workflows are ITIL-based, which means built-in guidance based on comprehensive IT best practice documentation.

When integrated with Nimsoft Monitor, another CA Technologies product, alerts are linked from the IT environment to service tickets. IT staff also receive infrastructure data framed within the context of the service ticket.

Companies looking to utilize NSD7 can choose monthly subscriptions based on named or concurrent-user licensing, either directly from CA Technologies or from the company’s partner network.