Dial SaaS for On-Demand IT Service Management
Posted by Shraddha Tilloo, Consultant, Infosys Technologies.
By the very sound of the word “SAAS”, it reflects many meanings ranging from “breath” & “Mom-In-Law” in Hindi to “Software As A Service”. The last meaning is something which has caught my fancy since last evening, when I attended a webinar of a vendor offering product suit for “On Demand IT Service Management” based on latest technology of web2.0 & SaaS.
Not that the other meanings of the word I mentioned earlier are less critical for my life (especially the second one “Mom-In-Law”), I thought of increasing my level of knowledge on SaaS beyond basics.
In our day to day life do we maintain the electricity that runs into our houses? Do we open a garage in the backyard every time our car goes down? Do we really bother to test the pipeline that carries the gas for our cooking?
No. You don't do these tasks because you understand that for certain things, its better to let specialists handle them and we focus on our core business. It increases your productivity, its cost effective and keeps you stress free.
Something similar can be expressed about SaaS, when I read through in details, surfed few blogs and updated my knowledge level on the topic. As Wikipedia defines Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. Some of the striking features of this model of software deployment are:
- Network/Internet based access and management relieving of troubles of heavy client server installation.
- Single instance, multi-tenant architecture which allows multiple customers accessing the application from single instance remotely.
- Centralized control and management of feature updates, patches & upgrades.
Bringing back the attention to our favorite topic (rather bread & butter) of ITSM, I was forced to believe that ‘On-Demand’ might be a a way to go while into the ITSM journey & can be considered as an option instead of traditional tool vendors while evaluating an ITSM tool.
I’m sure you will agree that most of the ITSM tools (likes of BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager & CA etc) have always raised eyebrows of ISTM program sponsors and stakeholders, because of their high cost of licenses, longer cycle of implementation & continuous release of upgrades/patches.Leveraging SaaS based tools and products can help accelerate your implementation of ITSM and there is great need to socialize this model into the ITSM world.
A true On-Demand IT Service Management offering can be an optimal combination of SaaS based ITSM tool, proven methodology for ITSM implementation & process management combined with assurance of reduced cost and time.
Finally I want you to read this interesting blog on the topic which I found while reading on the internet about SaaS:
http://myservicemonitor.com/ITSM_Fear_and_Loathing/give_your_itsm_implementati.html
Lets keep posting comments on this interesting topic and bring out some innovative thoughts around On-Demand ITSM, my favorite subject for now..
Comments
While SaaS eases the implementation and maintenance of software, it can also provide significant "Green" benefits especially when employed with a cloud computing model.
The software can be hosted in service provider's infrastructure which could be shared by multiple customers. While this could give rise to other concerns like data security, contract terms etc. but nevertheless, the model can provide very rich benefits in terms of Green IT.
Posted by: Mitesh Desai | June 15, 2009 07:55 AM