Remedy To Launch IT Services Management Suite Upgrade

Version 5.5 of the suite adds new features, user interfaces and support for automated workflow across the four components of the suite: Asset Management, Service Level Agreements, Help Desk and Change Management, said Jim Grant, general manager of Remedy, Mountain View, Calif.

"It means ultimately that instead of thinking about outages and fault management that we're thinking about how we see the problem before it arrives, before it affects our customer experience, how we make sure our support staff is responding to it," Grant said.

The suite also supports BMC's business service management strategy, a plan to provide tools that manage IT resources according to the business services they support, Grant said.

"Channel partners that are able to move from simple technical consulting to consulting around how the technology solves a business purpose will ultimately be more successful than the converse," Grant said.

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Asset Management 5.5 includes new asset lifecycle capabilities to track assets from purchasing and receiving through to retirement. Enhanced contract functionality provides improved tracking of software license compliance. The new version also enables IT departments to assign assets to different cost centers within the organization, said Tim Rochte, senior product manager at Remedy.

With version 5.5, Remedy completely rewrote its Service Level Agreements product, adding the ability to track performance goals by either time or availability, Rochte said.

"We've always had the idea of a time-driven SLA--an example would be a two-hour response time SLA--but we're now adding availability and proactive milestones, and those are things like what percentage of the time is something available and making sure there are milestones that say when I reach a certain threshold I should behave differently even though I haven't actually violated my SLA at this point," Rochte said.

Help Desk 5.5 and Change Management 5.5 both include service categorization so customers can identify what business service is being impacted by a particular incident or change request, Rochte said.

Change Management also includes enhanced automated integration with other products in the suite, he said.

Starting prices for the applications, available now, range from $10,000 to $35,000.