Service-now.com gains ITSM cloud user

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

If you're a newly hired IT manager at a rapidly growing global company, what might be one of the first management-related projects you undertake?

You've got to figure that IT service management (ITSM), given the imperative that IT align with the business, is a logical target. That's one of the areas that David Riley, senior director of IS and technology, zeroed in on when he arrived at Synaptics, a touch screen manufacturer in Santa Clara, Calif., in March 2010.

The ability to support the global company during its rapid growth -- 25% year over year -- was a big motivator, Riley says.

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If you're a newly hired IT manager at a rapidly growing global company, what might be one of the first management-related projects you undertake?

You've got to figure that IT service management (ITSM), given the imperative that IT align with the business, is a logical target. That's one of the areas that David Riley, senior director of IS and technology, zeroed in on when he arrived at Synaptics, a touch screen manufacturer in Santa Clara, Calif., in March 2010.

The ability to support the global company during its rapid growth -- 25% year over year -- was a big motivator, Riley says.

"We needed to be able to keep growing the company, support a global IT team that could operate around the clock and track ongoing issues, changes, projects and so forth," he says.

Implementing an ITSM platform based on the IT Information Library best practices framework was the way to go, Riley says he determined immediately. Then came the decision to go with ITSM software as a service (SaaS), he adds.

"The SaaS model seemed a good option because we could get ITSM with no overhead costs associated with infrastructure. We didn't have to buy hardware or pay annual support maintenance fees. We only pay an annual subscription fee, which has worked out really well for us," Riley says.

Synaptics has been using Service-now.com's ITSM SaaS offering since late 2010. Already it's changing how the organization thinks about business intelligence reporting, Riley says.

For example, Synaptics has been able to ratchet up its IT trending capabilities by exporting benchmarking, training and other data from Service-now.com into its analytics platform, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE).

"So now we do a lot of reporting in OBI on ticket management, changes, trending and so forth," Riley says.

"I can even get a breakdown on which individual is working more tickets than others and how much time people are spending on each ticket. This will help me plan for IT resources and for next year's budget or even two or three years out based on headcount," he adds.

Plus, not having to allocate staff time to support an internal ITSM platform is saving about 5% of an individual's time monthly, Riley says. "I can reallocate that resource to focus on more business-critical applications -- a main benefit of any SaaS model."

Synaptics uses Service-now.com to automate workflow for incident, problem, change and release processes, as well as for its knowledge, project and asset management applications. "It's been a godsend for us over the last few months," Riley says.

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Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.