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.  

One of the benefits of cloud based infrastructures is the ability to leverage them quickly to meet customer demand, and to scale them to meet the load.

Interestingly enough, such a situation happened recently in regard to the memorial service for Michael Jackson.   The cash strapped city of Los Angeles had to spend a lot of money to provide security etc for the event, so set up a website so fans could donate money to cover the expense.

Unfortunately, they failed to predict the load, and the the volume of fans caused the website to crash.  I would imagine they missed out on significant donations because of this crash.

Similarly, the website also crashed when fans wanted to apply for tickets.  I do not know what application or infrastructure was used for these two purposes, but its a good guess that they tried to use their regular infrastructure for normal events in the city, when given the amount of attention that this memorial service had in the media, a cloud based infrastructure would have been a better choice.  

Network World recently published an article around the management challenges of Virtualization where they surveyed more than 400 IT professionals on their virtualization strategy and how they manage their virtualized environments.

The outcomes of the survey are not surprising.   Essentially what the article is saying is that those organizations acknowledge the benefits that virtualization brings, including cost savings, agility and so on, but they lack the tools required to manage such environments.

That’s also what I’m hearing when I speak to IT organizations with highly virtualized environments.   Traditional infrastructure management approaches simply do not work in virtualized environments.   The standard infrastructure counters that are measured are no longer useful to track the performance of a virtual environment.

For example, how representative are traditional metrics like CPU, IO, Swap Space, Memory usage and so on, when the environment is constantly changing?  How can you compare these values to previous values when the underlying resources are being changed to meet demand, and new virtual machines are being created/removed to meet application loads?    Is high/low resource usage even a problem?

Not only that, but many organizations used to rely on experienced operations folks who understood what infrastructure supported what applications/business processes.    In a virtualized environment, relying on this sort of knowledge is much more difficult as the environment is changing so fast.

Realistically the only way to manage such environments is to understand what the business needs of each key application and how well the applications are meeting that need – essentially relegating infrastructure management tools from being at the forefront of problem identification to more of a supplementary information role, with application and end user experience monitoring solutions providing the core focus of what is good performance and what is bad.

This represents a fundamental shift for many organizations who have built their entire incident management processes around reacting to anomalies or alerts from infrastructure rather than monitoring the application.    These organizations are going to have to come up with a good strategy for monitoring the application and the end user experience to cope in a virtualized environment.

The article did not talk at all about virtual machine sprawl – which is a huge issue for highly virtualized environments.   This was a big surprise as I would have expected it to get a mention.   Virtualization is great that its so easy to stand up a virtual machine whenever its needed – especially the ability to be agile and respond to business needs.   But who manages these and decommissions them when no longer needed.   Many organizations are really struggling with this process.

Welcome to itsmbuzz.com!

itsmbuzz.com is a new site that aims to provide commentary around the IT Service management industry with particular focus around Business Service Management, Performance Management, SaaS and general best practices around IT.  

my aim with the site will be to focus more on the industry than one particular player or best practice framework.

I welcome any feedback on the site to

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