CA Streamlines Interfaces As Part Of Nimsoft Service Desk 7

"Service management area is going thru a huge reset in recent years," said Gijo Mathew, vice president of product marketing for Nimsoft. "Business users are expecting greater simplicity and productivity from technology. A lot of the old systems are less about user experience and more about function. IT wants to be able to adjust and pivot to the needs of the end users. The problem is that the software that they have used in the past was often hard to maintain and update. But, with managed services and software as a service, the agility is beginning to improve. So, the paradigm is shifting to one that is far more responsive to the needs of the users."

Mathew added that in addition to improving responsiveness, managed services and the SaaS model provide increased agility and scale and lower risk and cost of ownership, in most cases.

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"Nimsoft Service Desk was designed and created specifically for MSPs," he said. "We're trying to make everything very seamless and easy to do. The more streamlined we can make it, the easier it becomes."

Mathew points to a major refresh of the user interface, which has borrowed themes from social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn in order to make the GUI more intuitive, while at the same time preserving the professional aspect of the collaborative user experience. "The idea is to reduce the learning curve for end-users," he said. "Users can leverage the system to request IT services and initiate problem resolution without any special training. You can follow tickets and processes and services to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. It operates very similar to Twitter and Facebook. We need to make sure that people can resolve their own issues, get their answers quickly, and solve their own problems quickly and efficiently"

Version 7 also provides configurable ITIL-based "action driven" workflow options that prompt the user on potential next steps they may choose.

"In most cases it is up to humans to decipher the next step," Mathew said. "We have now automated some of those capabilities so that when somebody picks up a request, it has all the actions that the person could possibly do in the next step."

The platform supports multitenant environments and is designed to enable MSPs to fulfill their customers' diverse service requirements at reduced cost through a shared service-desk staffing model. Nimsoft Service Desk 7 also integrates with CA's Nimsoft Monitor, linking alerts from the IT environment to service tickets.

"This product was originally developed by an MSP," said Mathew. "So it was meant and designed to make an MSP very efficient and effective with the lowest cost of ownership. They can white label it, and make it look like it's their own and manage multiple customers."

PUBLISHED FEB. 19, 2013