Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools

Market Definition/Description

IT service support management (ITSSM) tools enable IT operations organizations, specifically infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers, to better support the production environment. ITSSM tools automate the tasks and workflows associated with the management and delivery of quality IT services to the business.

Magic Quadrant

Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools

Source: Gartner (August 2014)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Axios Systems

Offering Evaluated: Axios assyst

Founded in 1988, Axios Systems (Axios) is a privately held company with headquarters in Edinburgh, Scotland. Its founder was part of the workgroup that helped shape the contents and format of the original ITIL books during the genesis of the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF); consequently, Axios assyst is strongly aligned with ITIL best practices. Axios provides a well-regarded IT service catalog that is licensed within its ITSSM solution. Axios' highly differentiated IT Resource Performance Management (RPM) feature uses social collaboration and gamification to enable problem-solving and knowledge-sharing among IT groups.

Strengths

• Axios concentrates exclusively on providing ITSSM solutions.
• Axios has a high level of market understanding with respect to mobile, social and context-aware capabilities, demonstrated in IT RPM and the InfoZone view (contextual information about users and the IT environment for decision support) for support analysts and technicians.
• Axios maintains good relationships with customers and incorporates significant client feedback into product development.

Cautions

• Its sales capabilities are not as effective as its competitors in some regions, as Axios struggles to add customers quickly.
• The self-service portal capabilities require Adobe Flash, which has the potential to present access challenges for mobile users that cannot use Flash.
• The process designer tool that aligns Axios assyst with alternative IT process management frameworks is cumbersome.

BMC Software

Offerings Evaluated: BMC Remedy ITSM Suite, BMC FootPrints Service Core and BMC Remedyforce

Founded in 1980, BMC Software (BMC) is a privately held company headquartered in Houston, Texas. BMC licenses three enterprise-oriented ITSSM products: BMC Remedy ITSM Suite, BMC FootPrints Service Core and BMC Remedyforce. Remedy ITSM is available in on-premises and SaaS models (Remedy OnDemand). The products are aimed at organizations and managed service providers that have higher-than-average levels of IT maturity. BMC FootPrints (licensed perpetually on-premises) and BMC Remedyforce (licensed in the SaaS model) target midsize to enterprise-level customers and work well for customers who have low or average levels of IT maturity. While all products benefit from BMC's global marketing and sales channels, the source codes for all three products differ. Although BMC still holds the majority of ITSSM market share, its position has declined since 2012. The strength of BMC's product lineup often leads prospective customers to shortlist it for enterprise-level deals, but BMC often loses because of its pricing and complexity. (For further information on BMC, see "Vendor Rating: BMC Software" and "SWOT: BMC Software, ITOM Software, Worldwide.")

Strengths

• The introduction of MyIT and AppZone highlights BMC's understanding of the needs of higher-maturity, service-aligned IT organizations; BMC seeks to improve business-user productivity and provide a more satisfying experience for customers when working with the IT organization.
• BMC's ability to target multiple market segments by offering products with varying ease-of-use and capability levels positions it to compete in more bids than other ITSSM vendors.
• BMC maintains excellent IT operations management (ITOM) brand recognition outside ITSSM, and works to integrate its broader portfolio of products with its ITSSM solutions.

Cautions

• Gartner believes current debt load will likely limit BMC's options for doing major acquisitions within the ITSSM family of products.
• Broad market confusion remains around which BMC ITSSM products best meet the needs of particular customers.
• Customers of Remedyforce and FootPrints that desire broader BMC functionalities currently do not have the same integration experience across all products in the BMC ITOM portfolio.

CA Technologies

Offerings Evaluated: CA Service Management and CA Cloud Service Management

Founded in 1976, CA Technologies (CA) is a publicly held company headquartered in Islandia, New York. CA licenses two ITSSM products: CA Service Management and CA Cloud Service Management. CA Service Management is primarily licensed perpetually on-premises. Cloud Service Management (formerly known as CA Nimsoft Service Desk) is licensed exclusively in the SaaS model. CA's bifurcated product approach has succeeded in large-enterprise, low-maturity deals, where Cloud Service Management has won, and CA Service Management would not have fared well. CA has been effective in increasing brand awareness, and its programs that offer extended trials for products such as CA Cloud Service Management have been well received. In a market where customers replace tools often, CA customer retention has been high, due in part to its customer outreach and engagement programs. (For further information on CA Technologies, see "Vendor Rating: CA Technologies.")

Strengths

• CA Service Management and CA Cloud Service Management use mobile and social capabilities effectively for IT business and internal IT communication and collaboration.
• Improved marketing of CA Cloud Service Management has been well received by enterprise organizations with low maturity levels — a segment that has traditionally been difficult for products to cater to.
• CA remains a well-regarded brand with high levels of market awareness.

Cautions

• Prospective customers perceive CA Service Management as too complex, because it fails to provide a unified view across all IT administrative product consoles.
• CA Service Management lacks dashboard capabilities and only offers enhanced reporting through a partnership with Xtraction Solutions, which increases the total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers who desire richer dashboard capabilities.
• Although CA has improved its upgrade path, many customers use older versions of CA Service Management.

HP

Offerings Evaluated: HP Service Manager and HP Service Anywhere

Founded in 1939, HP is a publicly traded company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP has two products for the ITSSM market: HP Service Manager, available on-premises for enterprise organizations, and HP Service Anywhere, available as SaaS for SMBs. HP is an established name in the ITOM market. In 2011, HP acquired Autonomy, a big data analytics company, and has used the technology to build HAVEn, an analytics platform. In 2014, HP introduced a service catalog and request fulfillment product, HP Propel, alongside capabilities built into its ITSSM products. The basic edition of HP Propel is offered free of charge. (For further information on HP, see "Vendor Rating: HP.")

Strengths

• HP has a strong brand and global reach. Its professional services organization is available in all major regions, and provides a consistent quality of ITSSM implementation and support.
• HP has folded the big data capabilities of Autonomy and Vertica into its ITSSM strategy, enabling customers to use search and analytics to improve areas such as incident management, knowledge management and social collaboration, which serve as key differentiators in the ITSSM market.
• HP Service Anywhere and HP Propel have improved HP's ability to provide simpler, easier-to-use offerings for IT service support and request management functions compared with its traditional, on-premises-based products.

Cautions

• HP has demonstrated poor marketing execution, reflected by the low frequency with which HP ITSSM products appear on client RFP shortlists, despite HP's brand recognition.
• Gartner's market share analysis concludes that HP's share of the ITSSM market has dropped for three consecutive years, which indicates it is unable to retain customers and attract new ones at levels comparable to its competitors.
• Some customer references and Gartner clients report difficulties when integrating the ITSSM tools with other ITOM products from HP.

IBM

Offering Evaluated: SmartCloud Control Desk

Founded in 1911, IBM is a publicly traded company headquartered in Armonk, New York. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk combines asset and service management offerings that enable organizations to manage services delivered via IT and non-IT assets. SmartCloud Control Desk provides a hub that IT organizations use to integrate with the IBM Cloud & Smarter Infrastructure bundled offering (Tivoli Software, Maximo, Netcool, Tririga, and Endpoint Manager) to deliver an end-to-end service view of the environment they support.

IBM Service Engage is part of a broader IBM strategy to market and sell directly to the IT practitioner. It offers an immersive Web experience where prospects can view demos and request free, timed trials of IBM Infrastructure Management products, including SmartCloud Control Desk. SmartCloud Control Desk appeals to customers who want rich functionality and are able to manage a steep learning curve. (For further information on IBM, see "Vendor Rating: IBM.")

Strengths

• IBM maintains its strength through its ability to sell into its customer base, rather than aggressively marketing SmartCloud Control Desk against other vendors' ITSSM products.
• IBM has extensive global partnerships and resources that appeal to, and support, its large global customer base.
• SmartCloud Control Desk is a well-consolidated IT service support management offering that provides broad functionalities in IT/operational technology (OT) asset management and client management.

Cautions

• IBM has not developed SmartCloud Control Desk to compete aggressively within a broader market of potential customers.
• IBM customers have not demonstrated SmartCloud Control Desk integration with a wider range of IBM products, such as IBM Connections.
• The complexity of IBM's ITSSM offering introduces a steep learning curve, particularly for I&O organizations not accustomed to IBM ITOM software.

Landesk

Offering Evaluated: LANDesk Service Desk

Landesk is a privately held company headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. LANDesk Service Desk integrates with its broader portfolio of assets, systems, security and client and mobile device management solutions to enable IT organizations to take a user-oriented approach to IT service management. Landesk's move to Total User Management licenses, which bundle all Landesk products by the number of users in an organization, allows Landesk customers to license a consolidated product set. By providing a wide range of context that supports interactions, Landesk enables IT organizations to use machine data to improve the business-user experience. With Landesk's strong process-design tool, IT organizations can structure and automate complex ITSSM tasks within a process.

Strengths

• Landesk's ITSSM solution focuses on business users and endpoints, and easily integrates with its client and mobile device management offerings.
• Landesk has improved its partnership program and is working well with third-party independent software vendors (ISVs).
• Customer references report that Landesk's ITSSM product is easy to implement and configure to suit their organizations' requirements.

Cautions

• The sales and marketing teams often struggle to highlight the differentiation between Landesk's and its competitors' ITSSM offerings, and, instead, focus on where Landesk has traditionally demonstrated market leadership — namely, client management.
• Landesk does not have as many SaaS customers as other vendors with dual-licensing models.
• Customer references state that the Web-enabled UI has less functionality than the thick client; thus, the product may be less versatile when accessed from the Internet and mobile devices.

ManageEngine

Offering Evaluated: ServiceDesk Plus

Founded in 1996, ManageEngine is a division of Zoho, a privately held company headquartered in Pleasanton, California. Zoho caters to the SMB market in IT operations management with its ManageEngine brand. ServiceDesk Plus is a stripped-down solution with a download-and-deploy channel and requires no professional services or highly skilled internal resources. ManageEngine changed the ITSSM market dynamics when it announced it would offer ServiceDesk Plus free of charge. ManageEngine has a large customer base (more than 25,000 paid customers), primarily composed of SMBs.

Strengths

• ServiceDesk Plus is a cost-effective solution for SMBs.
• ServiceDesk Plus serves as a bridge to ManageEngine products for application performance management (APM) and network performance management, which integrate easily with it.
• ManageEngine has run several successful marketing campaigns to promote the free version of ServiceDesk Plus, which has raised ManageEngine's profile with ITSSM tool buyers.

Cautions

• While all ITSSM capabilities are present for inclusion, capabilities beyond incident management are subpar.
• ServiceDesk Plus's low-cost provider model also means there is a trade-off between cost and product quality.
• Development and support resources must scale across ManageEngine and many Zoho products, and may be spread thin.

ServiceNow

Offering Evaluated: ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite

ServiceNow is a publicly traded company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Its SaaS products primarily target large enterprises. ServiceNow's suite can be hosted on-premises in exceptional circumstances. ServiceNow has invested in regional data centers to address local data and performance requirements to drive the majority of its business through SaaS. The company has looked for revenue beyond the ITSSM market for customers in what it calls "enterprise service management," and refers to its product as a cloud-based platform with a single system of record. At present, most customers license ServiceNow IT Service Automation Suite with the intention of building on the development platform to extend into other areas of the business. (For further information on ServiceNow, see "SWOT: ServiceNow, IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide.")

Strengths

• ServiceNow's high-availability SaaS architecture provides customers with stable, low-latency instances.
• ServiceNow has a strong, highly effective sales and marketing capability that has attracted many customers and driven its product into most of the ITSSM RFP shortlists that Gartner sees.
• ServiceNow's rapidly expanding partner network helps organizations around the globe with not only implementing the product, but also developing simple request-and-fulfill applications on the ServiceNow development platform.

Cautions

• IT operations management offerings licensed with IT Service Automation Suite (configuration management database [CMDB], IT Service Catalog and IT Asset Management) may require licensing additional ServiceNow products when a more detailed set of requirements is presented with regard to these functionalities.
• Changes to pricing models have confused prospects and some customers.
• On-premises customers pay the same as SaaS customers, even though they cover the hosting directly and do not benefit from automatic upgrades.

Evaluation Criteria

Although a vendor may meet the inclusion criteria for the Magic Quadrant for ITSSM Tools, its final placement on the Magic Quadrant will depend on how it scored in several categories. The evaluation criteria are based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Ability to Execute

Product/Service: Gartner evaluates the eight capabilities essential to the selection of an ITSSM tool:

1. Incident and problem management — The tool is evaluated on the ability to manage the life cycles of IT incidents and problem records from recording to closing. The tool should support the collection, analysis and communication of incident and problem management data.
2. Change, configuration and release management — The tool is evaluated on the ability to govern various aspects of the IT change management process. The tool must also support the configuration management process by enabling the creation and maintenance of a complete and accurate picture of configuration across various infrastructure elements via a CMDB. Lastly, the tool must provide release governance capabilities to ensure that approved changes are executed in the environment in accordance with the IT organization's defined and documented procedures.
3. Service request management — The tool is evaluated based on the ability to present an online portal to business end users who are requesting help from the IT service support organization in the forms of incident reports, change requests, IT component ordering or administration.
4. IT knowledge management — The tool is evaluated on its ability to collect, store and access information about IT services to enable the I&O organization to better manage IT service assets through their life cycles. The service knowledge portal should enable user self-service so that end users may resolve simple incidents themselves.
5. Reporting and dashboards — The tool is evaluated on its ability to provide trend reports that measure operational productivity across core processes. Dashboard and reporting capabilities must be tied to business value metrics, common critical success factors and key performance indicators. The tool must offer multidimensional charts that show how related metrics affect each other.
6. Out-of-the-box best practices — The tool is evaluated on the quality of preconfigured workflows in accordance with industry best practices and the ease of use with respect to modifying those workflows as needed.
7. Integration with other data sources and ITOM tools — The tool is evaluated on its out-of-the-box integration capabilities to link to IT asset management (ITAM) processes, the IT service catalog, IT financial management (ITFM) tools, enterprise communications applications (ECA) tools, APM, network fault and performance monitoring, and client management tools.
8. Integration with telephony and communications infrastructure, unified communications and collaboration (UCC) platforms — The tool is evaluated on its ability to integrate with telephony, multiparty conferencing, messaging, presence/IM, software clients in UCC suites and communication applications (such as Emergency Mass Notification System [EMNS]).