In the past, service desk platforms operated entirely independently of other IT management platforms, such as monitoring. Plus, as technology infrastructures in organizations expanded, so did the number of tools used to manage them. As a result, in many service provider and enterprise organizations, a complex mix of point solutions and legacy platforms needed to be bought, deployed and maintained. Because these systems weren’t integrated, it was difficult and time consuming to keep appropriate staff informed, pinpoint issues and determine optimization strategies.

Fourth-generation service desk platforms are now offered as part of complete IT Management-as-a Service solutions. ITMaaS solutions represent cloud-based offerings that deliver the essential management tools that IT teams need to access and view an entire IT environment, track and analyze performance, and ultimately improve performance and availability. When organizations leverage ITMaaS, they can use a unified platform and eliminate disparate legacy and point platforms. This can significantly reduce the time, cost and effort associated with platform support.

The integrated capabilities of ITMaaS solutions can yield other time savings as well. For example, organizations can leverage a monitoring platform that offers automated discovery capabilities that can feed information into a CMDB that is shared by the service desk platform. Consequently, your service desk agents can always leverage current configuration information when troubleshooting—while they minimize the time and effort required to manually update the CMDB.

Further, this integration enabled by ITMaaS offerings yields better information and more actionable insights. For example, performance and availability information collected from target systems can automatically generate service desk incidents, allowing service desk personnel to start to address issues—before they have an adverse impact on the business.

Note: This is the fourth in a five-part series of posts on the fourth-generation service desk. In our third post, we outlined how these modern platforms enable IT teams to benefit from a SaaS model. In our final post, we’ll outline how the next generation of service desk platforms enables IT teams to leverage ITIL with unprecedented ease. In addition you can also view a webcast titled “Service Desk Manager: Where do we go from here?” with George Spalding, Executive VP Pink Elephant to understand the obstacles of prior generations of service management platforms and learn how a new generation of solutions addresses these fundamental limitations.