Get full ITIL v3 ITSM functionality over the Web
Service-Now's IT service management platform helps improve system uptime
IT Best Practices Alert
By
Linda Musthaler
,
Network World
, 09/08/2008
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What does it take to rank among the top 50 companies on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America?
Among other things, these days it takes great information technology. Brian Morgan, director of IT at Interbank FX (IBFX)
in Salt Lake City concurs.
IBFX is a leading provider of online foreign exchange trading services, serving clients from more than 140 countries. The
company handles about $4 billion in transactions a day for its customers. Inc. magazine recently named IBFX as the 46th fastest
growing private company in America, and the 5th fastest growing financial services company. Utah Business magazine gives IBFX
the title of number one growth company in the state of Utah.
To reach and sustain that level of growth, the IT systems need to be able to grow and adapt rapidly to the company’s needs.
This is one of the reasons Morgan and his IT team selected a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering from Service-now.com as the company’s IT service management (ITSM) platform. “Service-now.com helps us provide better uptime for our systems than
we could do if we hosted an application ourselves,” says Morgan.
Service-now.com is a fully hosted on-demand IT service management application based on ITIL v3. The company was founded in
2005 by Fred Luddy, who previously was CTO at Peregrine Systems and Remedy. When Luddy left Peregrine, he wanted to create
a company that offers a far simpler way to do service management. The result is an application that is entirely Web-based
using Web 2.0 techniques. Service-now.com competes against the heavy hitters of the ITSM world, including IBM, HP, BMC Software
and CA. The difference is, you don’t have to install any software in order to use Service-now.com.
When Brian Morgan took the IT director job at IBFX, the company had a rudimentary open source trouble ticketing system. He
introduced his team and the CIO to Service-now.com, which Morgan had used at a previous company. “As soon as we started using
Service-now.com [at IBFX], we became 10 times more efficient in our computing services,” says Morgan. His group uses Service-Now
for incident management, change management, the service catalog and a range of other activities. They have a CMBD that will
be fully loaded with all the configuration information for the entire IT and facilities teams. “We are on plan to use it to
track everything,” says Morgan.
Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.
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Comments (6)
ITIL....form over functionBy Schratboy on September 8, 2008, 12:58 pmReally? So everyone is seemingly jumping on-board to enjoy a network management process to track everything? Laughable. Based on most of the IT managers I speak...
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it is the peopleBy Anonymous on September 24, 2008, 9:04 pmLooks too good to be true. What if your company's link to the Internet is down? How would you log a ticket at service-now.com?
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Looks Great!By Anonymous on September 24, 2008, 11:34 pmHaving everything in one place would sure make for a "tight-ship". Sounds great. The biggest challenge is how to get everything in a CMDB and even harder is the...
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Brian MorganBy Anonymous on September 25, 2008, 1:13 pmBrian Morgan is an incompetent idiot.
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IT Service ManagementBy new star on January 2, 2009, 12:57 am
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Great Way ForwardBy Anonymous on May 18, 2009, 5:17 amThe big boys (IBM, HP, BMC etc.) have been screwing around for way to long!! Hope this concept works and imporves over the next few years. Shafiq Hamid http://q8buzz.com
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