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2. Table of Contents
_____________________
The Changing Role of IT Support……………………………………………1
The Need to break with Tradition……………………………………………2
A New Approach: On-Demand Service Desks…………………………..3
What to look for in an On-Demand IT Service Desk Provider……..5
The ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand Advantage………………………….6
Contact for ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand:
sdp-ondemand-support@manageengine.com
Contacts for ManageEngine:
US: +1 888 720 9500
Intl: +1 925 924 9500
US Intl: +1 800 443 6694(alternate number)
Australia: +1 800 631 268
UK: 0800 028 6590
sales@manageengine.com
Delivering the IT Service Desk of Tomorrow ©ManageEngine On-Demand

3. Page |1
The Changing Role of IT is the approach that the business offices are
now taking.
Support
Nowhere is the pressure to deliver a rapid
_____________________
response greater than the IT service desk. Yet
IT support is critical to the success of any there are other pressures in the system that
organization, and the IT service desk has been make it very difficult for an IT help desk to
the customer-facing image of IT for years. It deliver the kind of proactive services that
has offered a single point of contact for organizations want. IT help desk budgets took
departments and end users alike for all IT- deep cuts during the recent recession, and
related issues. Yet the role of the IT they continue to be managed tightly. IT help
organization itself is changing. Once it was a desk managers now face the challenge of
driver of cost efficiency; today there is responding to a demand for increased
pressure for IT to become a technology commitment to service delivery and a
enabler, aligning itself with business goals and demand to do more with fewer people and
aiding revenue growth. This evolution is full of smaller budgets.
challenges:
That combination of pressures is pushing
•Increasing demands and expectations from technician productivity and cost efficiency
end users have contributed to the increasing back into the spotlight again. IT managers
complexity of IT systems. need an effective service desk solution that
can support a rapidly changing business
•New technologies and application climate, one that offers:
improvements have resulted in ubiquitous
networks and multiple service delivery •Flexibility to scale up and down rapidly in
platforms. response to business needs
•Organizations have expanded their •Little or no maintenance and administrative
operations to new locations and new time overhead
zones; the workforce itself has become more
•Anytime, anywhere access by both
mobile and untethered.
technicians and users
Striving to deliver strong customer-oriented
And, they need to deliver this service without
support in the face of an increasing influx of
large CAPEX and OPEX investments or the
support calls, IT teams are adopting an
inflexibility of long-term contracts.
“anytime, anywhere” approach, because that
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4. Page |2
conspire to reduce the amount of time an IT
The Need to Break with team has to support users, to say nothing of
the time they have to devote to strategic
Tradition
planning and development.
____________________
Traditional service desk deployments cannot
While the traditional install-and-deploy fully support users anytime and anywhere
service desk model has worked for many With organizations increasingly having a
years, the on-premise infrastructure required diverse user base and a distributed work
to support it often involves large capital force, a traditional on-premise IT support
investments, lengthy deployment cycles, and center infrastructure can become a significant
resource-intensive maintenance. Proving both constraint. If the infrastructure is too
initial and ongoing ROI has been a challenge. inflexible to enable help desk technicians to
Let us examine these matters in more detail: provide anytime, anywhere support, service
delivery and user satisfaction decline.
Traditional service desk deployments require
Important metrics on timeliness of response
heavy investments in infrastructure
and resolution could take a hit. To support a
The traditional service desk requires an
mobile work force, an IT help desk team
integrated, secure, and reliable IT
requires a help desk application that enables
infrastructure, including multiple versions of
full service delivery at any time and from
management, messaging, and security server
anyplace, without worries about VPN
technologies. Installing and configuring
connectivity and the like.
servers, managing vital business information
with network data backups, and maintaining Traditional service desk deployments and do
the data center itself pose additional burdens. not permit optimal use of resources
An IT service desk needs to be agile to meet
Traditional service desk deployments come
the changing needs of business. Scaling up or
with maintenance and upgrade hassles
down should be easy and should not involve
The complexity of the service desk system can
cumbersome billing, operations, or support
mean that that an IT organization must
issues. With a traditional on-premise service
devote a measurable portion of its resources
desk infrastructure, though, cumbersome
and time to monitoring and managing the
issues are the norm. Scalability may require
service desk infrastructure itself, which drives
the acquisition of new license files (not to
up costs and reduces time to market. There is
mention hardware), which must be installed
hardware to manage and maintain, software
and maintained, and this may not be the
to back-up and patch. Technicians must be
fastest or easiest way to ensure that IT
on-board around the clock to ensure business
support keeps pace with business expansion.
continuity. And then there are the
Moreover, as businesses go through different
complexities of upgrades: Large product
periods of expansion and contraction, there
upgrades can result in a significant portion of
may be times when scaling down makes
the technicians’ time being spent on
sense. In a traditional model of IT service
troubleshooting issues. These requirements
delivery, though, such a contraction may
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5. Page |3
leave hardware and technician resources
unused, wasting resources and expertise.
sign up for an account and access the IT help
Traditional service desks seldom offer desk through a browser.
flexible pricing options
Traditional service desk software products Gartner, in a publication titled ‘The IT Service
often require an organization to pay for more Desk Market Is Ready for SaaS’ (ID Number:
than it actually uses. Help desk software G0016652)noted in 2009 that the IT service
providers that develop exclusively for on- desk market was a prime candidate for
premise deployments often take a one-size- significant growth in SaaS deployments and
fits-all approach. Companies using these revenue—projecting that SaaS deployments
products are locked into user licenses with of IT help desk services would account for
long term contracts, huge up-front payments, 10% of the help desk market by 2012. “If
and massive annual application license fees. you're evaluating new solutions,” Gartner’s
analysts went on to advise, “then consider
Traditional helpdesk software models do not SaaS IT service desk tools as a viable
provide power and control to customers alternative to traditional on-premise models.”
Traditional software licensing models can lock
up an IT organization for years. If an The SaaS delivery model offers a variety of
organization is dissatisfied, it may be unable advantages over the traditional on-premise
to switch vendors easily or without incurring model:
substantial switching and migration costs. • SaaS applications require minimal
capital investment.
A New Approach: On- • They can be deployed and scaled on-
Demand IT Service Desks demand and they require less
intensive management.
_____________________
• The initial ROI can be demonstrated
Since IT service desk applications became easily, and the total cost of ownership
widely available almost two decades ago, we (TCO) is very low.
have seen functionality evolve, processes
These advantages are prompting IT managers
mature, and integration capabilities advance.
to turn to SaaS solutions not just for help desk
For most of this period, the underlying model
management but also for a wide range of
of on-premise service desk deployment
other IT management functions.
remained unchanged.
Let us look at these advantages in more
Recently, though, the software-as-a-service
detail:
(SaaS) delivery model has begun to offer help
desk managers a viable alternative to the On-demand service desks require minimal
traditional on-premise model. In the SaaS up-front investments
delivery model, help desk software is hosted With an on-demand service desk, up-front
externally and delivered as a service to CAPEX costs are minimal. The solutions are
customers over the Internet. Customers can
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6. Page |4
hosted by a vendor, on infrastructure residing can focus on delivering services to the
in one or more secure data centers, so the organization rather than having to service the
organization subscribing to the service does underlying help desk infrastructure.
not have to invest in servers, software
licenses, and so forth. Acquiring access to the On-demand service desks accelerate
help desk service is a matter of subscribing to response times and offer wider coverage of
the service and accessing the application support
The on-demand help desk can be accessed
through a browser.
from any place that has Internet connectivity.
On-demand service desks can be up and Technicians can offer 24X7 support via phone
running almost immediately call, remote access, and more. On-demand
Without the need to provision hardware or help desk software that offers social features
install software on-premise, IT departments such as integrated chat and screen-sharing
can effectively deploy an operational service can helps technicians get to the bottom of
desk in very little time. The service desk issues and solve problems quickly from any
application can be configured to match the location. This can reduce the time it takes to
business process workflows of the respond to a user request as well as the
organization. The administrator then sends average time to resolve an incident, both of
out email invites to technicians and users in which can reduce the cost of a service call
the organization to sign up for the service, while improving customer satisfaction.
much as it is done for services such as Gmail.
All this can be done in a matter of days, On-demand service desks maximize the
effectively reducing time-to-service delivery optimal use of resources
and effectively delivering a rapid return on Organizations relying on hosted infrastructure
investment. and services can scale their use of services
up—and down—in response to rapidly
On-demand service desks are maintenance- changing business demands just by clicking a
free and reduce support costs button. Because the service provider owns
In addition to the elimination of the major up- and maintains the infrastructure, the
front CAPEX, IT organizations subscribing to a organization subscribing to the service avoids
SaaS help desk offering need not hire or train the costs of underutilizing hardware as
technicians to maintain the help desk demands change.
infrastructure or worry about managing
On-demand service desks offer flexible pay-
software updates or upgrades. Day-to-day
maintenance of both the hardware and the as-you-go pricing
software is the responsibility of the hosted On-demand service desk pricing models are
service provider, as are operating system based on the number of technicians and/or
users accessing the system, effectively
patches, application updates, and upgrades.
Subscribers can always take advantage of the enabling an organization to pay only for the
latest version of the ITSM product without services they use. The pricing is usually “per
technician” and the term of a subscription
having to manage the upgrades themselves,
ensuring that personnel in the IT organization contract could be annual, quarterly, or even
monthly, depending on the customer’s
Delivering the IT Service Desk of Tomorrow ©ManageEngine On-Demand

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preference. Even if the anticipated usage is • Multi-channel support
overestimated, IT service desk managers may • Self-service portal
have the flexibility to alter payment options • Knowledge management
and pay only for active users. Costs become • Service level management
predictable and the risk of budget over-runs is • Asset management
minimized. • Incident management
• Problem management
On-demand service desks reduce the risk of
vendor lock-in • Change management
SaaS service desks are typically offered on a • Release management
subscription basis. If an organization is not • Real time reports and dashboards
satisfied with the service desk offering, it can
Ease of Implementation
cancel the subscription and switch to another
Verify that you can sign up, create user
SaaS vendor. Comparatively, switching out
accounts, configure the application to suit
on-premise help desk offerings is a much
your organization’s workflows, and be up and
costlier and more complex undertaking than
running quickly. If implementing a SaaS
switching between hosted help desk
solution takes more than a few days, the
offerings.
solution may not prove very flexible over
time.
What to Look for in an On-
Demand IT Service Desk Integration
Determine whether the on-demand IT service
Provider desk offering integrates seamlessly with in-
_____________________ house infrastructure (such as Active
Directory) as well as other hosted services,
Finding the right on-demand service desk such as CRM, analytics, and other IT
vendor involves due diligence. It organizations management applications in the cloud.
should consider the following points:
Usability
Vendor Reputation Determine whether the IT service desk
Verify that the SaaS vendor has a proven offering is sufficiently intuitive. It should be as
record for delivering a hosted IT service desk simple as any email or social networking
offering. Only an established vendor can offer application you use every day. This is
a reliable infrastructure that can scale to important in terms of user adoption, and
accommodate spikes and steady growth. faster mastery of the service desk solution
results in greater ROI.
Completeness of Solution
Verify that the IT service desk solution offered Data ownership and migration
on-demand includes all the functionality Verify that your organization retains exclusive
required for complete end-to-end IT service ownership of your data. Since data in a SaaS
desk operations, including: service desk offering resides on storage
systems owned by a vendor, it is important
• Automated ticket management
Delivering the IT Service Desk of Tomorrow ©ManageEngine On-Demand

8. Page |6
that the vendor acknowledges your Product upgrades
ownership of that data and provides you with Understand the vendor’s policies on product
exclusive access to retrieve it. Your vendor updates and upgrades. The SaaS service desk
should agree to provide you with all your functionality should be enhanced as new
data, in the format you specify, should you features become available, and the vendor
decide to move to another service desk should have a clear roadmap and schedule for
solution at some future point. fixes and upgrades. Upgrades should be
automatic and should not cause any
Service level agreements downtime that would impact service desk
Review the service level agreements (SLAs) operations at the customer end.
offered by on-demand service providers and
determine whether the promised levels of Flexible contract
application uptime and availability are Verify that you can scale your subscription up
sufficient for your business. In an on-demand and down as needed and that you pay only
service desk, there are no partial outages. The for what you use as you go.
service desk is either available or not. You
Customer Support
should check the average uptime of your
vendor in the last few years, keeping an eye Verify that you can access the hosted service
out for the frequency of unscheduled outages. provider’s on-call or email-based expert help
for product support. Ideally, the vendor will
Uptime and availability levels should be
clearly defined, as should be the associated offer service escalation paths and guarantee
penalties if these agreements are not response and resolution times according to
maintained—and all this should be clear up well-definition issue severity levels.
front, before you sign a contract.
The ServiceDesk Plus On-
Security and disaster recovery
Review the vendor’s network security
Demand Advantage
provisions and disaster recovery plans. Your _____________________
connection to the hosted offering should be
ManageEngine, the IT management division
128/256 bit SSL encrypted and should provide
of Zoho Corporation, whose SaaS offerings
for intrusion prevention and detection. The
are used by more than 4 million subscribers
vendor’s infrastructure should provide load
around the world, offers an on-line help desk
balancing, redundancy, and fault tolerance.
solution that has been designed to meet the
Your data should be backed up regularly and
needs of organizations that want to deliver
stored in a separate geographic location for
optimal service at an optimized price.
disaster recovery and business continuity
ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand is a complete,
purposes. You should also ask about failover
SaaS-based, ITIL-compatible help desk system
to a remote data center in the event of a
for businesses of all sizes. It delivers offers all
catastrophic failure of the data center
the key features a help desk requires,
housing the servers supporting your service
including:
desk offering.
Delivering the IT Service Desk of Tomorrow ©ManageEngine On-Demand

9. Page |7
• Automated ticket management
• Configurable business rules and SLA
• User self-service portal
• Integrated knowledge base
• Asset management, purchases &
Next Steps
contracts
• ITIL workflows for incidents, problems _____________________
and changes
For more information on how ServiceDesk
• Extensive reporting and dashboard
Plus On-Demand can help you with your IT
capability
service management needs, please visit
ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand is based on http://ondemand.manageengine.com/service
Service Desk Plus, a mature, on-premise help -desk/index.html.
desk solution from ManageEngine that more
than 15,000 organizations around the world Contact
rely on. This SaaS offering enables an IT _____________________
organization to deliver comprehensive
anytime, anywhere help desk services and Contact for ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand:
best-in-class support to users without the sdp-ondemand-support@manageengine.com
burden of on-premise hardware and software
Contacts for ManageEngine:
to install or manage. With attractive pay-as-
you-go pricing, ServiceDesk Plus On-Demand US: +1 888 720 9500
is a full-featured help desk offering that Intl: +1 925 924 9500
delivers the rapid time-to-service, rapid ROI,
US Intl: +1 800 443 6694(alternate number)
flexibility, and scalability that IT help desk
managers need in a world where doing more Australia: +1 800 631 268
with less is the rule of the day. UK: 0800 028 6590
sales@manageengine.com
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
About ManageEngine
ManageEngine is the leading provider of cost-effective enterprise IT management software and the only one making the 90-10 promise – to
provide 90 percent of the capabilities offered by the Big 4 at just 10 percent of the price. The ManageEngine suite offers enterprise IT
management solutions including Network Management, HelpDesk ITIL, Bandwidth Monitoring, Application Management, Desktop Management,
Security Management, Password Management, Active Directory reporting, and a Managed Services (MSP) platform. ManageEngine products are
easy to install, setup and use, and offer extensive support, consultation, and training. More than 50,000 organizations in 200 countries, from
different verticals, industries, and sizes use ManageEngine to take care of their IT management needs cost effectively. ManageEngine is a
division of ZOHO Corporation. For more information on ManageEngine, please visit www.manageengine.com.
Delivering the IT Service Desk of Tomorrow ©ManageEngine On-Demand