BMC, through their Remedy solution have long been the 800 pound gorilla in the service desk market.  Their acquisition of the remedy technology from Peregrine is arguably one of the most successful acquisitions in IT service management.  It certainly transformed BMC and provided the platform for their successful BSM strategy.

However, in the last few years the success was starting to loose its luster from more innovative competitors who could offer service desk solutions at a fraction of the cost and with more flexibility thanks to a SaaS delivery model.    I know of a number of companies who were able to move from Remedy to such solution for a fraction of a Remedy upgrade.  We also saw traditionally exclusive BMC partners sign up with additional solutions to fill this gap.

Todays announcement at least shows the market that BMC is serious about filling this hole and moving into this space.  The choice of the SFDC platform also seems like a good choice, not only allowing BMC to get their solution to market quickly, but also to exploit existing SFDC customers who want to move to an enterprise service desk but also integrate it with their sales automation solution.  

It will be interesting to see if BMC have left this too late or not.   Certainly if they had made this announcement two years ago they could have capitalized on the huge momentum behind Remedy.  However, vendors such as Service Now, Netsuite and the like have started to gain market share - will BMC be able to stop the erosion and win back some of those customers?   Probably its really down to how willing BMC are to cannibalize the existing Remedy install base and let them move to the new solution in a cost effective manner, and provide seamless migration from existing Remedy solutions and the new SaaS based offering.  

This announcement certainly makes the Service Desk market more interesting again.

There are a lot of reasons why businesses may be draw to SaaS based applications.   One of them is that they can be a good way for the business to bypass an IT department that they view as being unsupportive or unreceptive to their needs.

IT departments need to be aware of this trend because if not managed it could significantly change the way that IT is delivered to business users, and has the potential to end up costing the business significantly more money.

IT departments need to partner up with the business when it comes to SaaS based offerings.  Instead of seeing them as a threat, they should regard them as just another way they can provide services to their users.   With some services, SaaS will make sense - it will be cheaper, quicker to set up and less costly - but this will not be the case for everything.

That means that members of the IT organization need to be business savvy enough to understand what the business users actually need (which could be different than what they ask for) and help drive the requirements for the applications (and delivery models of those applications) that support those needs.   These needs can also be rationalized over multiple departments to save cost.     To be successful, these people should sit 'with' their business counterparts and form a conduit into the IT department for understanding the changing requirements for business applications.

Without such an approach, business users now have the ability to easily go elsewhere for many of the applications they need.   An IT organization who does not understand what the business needs and is not their partner in creating the right services may find that new services are popping up in every corner of the business, with little oversight, little technical evaluation, and with little consideration for aspects such as security, performance, redundancy, standards and so on.

Business users will likely miss key steps of a SaaS provider evaluation in terms of understanding how resilient their architectures are, what the SLAs for performance and availability there are (and what the fine print really means) and so on.   Ultimately the whole company suffers in this approach.

Better led IT departments will partner up to work with the business and will build the right portfolio of services with the delivery model tied to the requirements of the service.

Does it really make sense to run a traditional service desk now modern SaaS based service desk solutions are available?

While the service desk is central to incident, problem and change management, arguably the core processes in any IT organization, that does not mean its not a good candidate to be replaced with a SaaS solution.  

The service desk really is an ideal candidate for a SaaS offering:

• It needs to be available to all end users, who could be geographically dispersed
• The operators may also be dispersed, or be on call outside of hours from home
• incident, problem and change management more and more rely on industry standard best practices such as ITIL; and when buying a good service desk today, what you're really buying is something that can facilitate those practices rather than a piece of software
• It is being used by non-technical users for the most part, so a modern web 2.0 interface is a plus
• Access may be required by 3rd party suppliers or even customers
• Loads are clustered at certain times of the day
• The costs can be treated as opex rather than capex
• SaaS based service desks are more likely to provide open interfaces to other tools, for example using web services to interface with a Business Service Management solution.

 
Vendors that provide the traditional service desk will argue that the overall costs are lower, but this is a disingenuous argument.   They fail to take into account the costs required to matain the service desk, and significantly under state the required upgrade costs.   For example, I've done projects in a few organizations of varying sizes where not only were the upgrade costs immense, they pretty much had to start again as the vendors did not provide a viable upgrade path.   Its pretty easy to see through this argument as it is only made by those who do not have a viable SaaS based offering.  

In any case, the SaaS based companies want to make their sales numbers too, and discounts can be had, especially in competitive situations and in medium to large scales.

Next time the maintenance contract is up for renewal for companies with a traditional service desk, they should seriously consider a SaaS based offering.   Maintaining an internal service desk is ultimately a distraction for an IT organization who's charter is to ensure that the business or customers can use the application they need effectively.   SaaS offerings can be cheaper, faster, more secure and more flexible than the traditional approach.  

It is the opinion of this author that traditional service desks will ultimately become niche offerings with the majority of companies using a SaaS based model for the service desk.