TO: ALL - Help-Desk Market Analysis
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The Help Desk Delivers -- From midlevel management tools to service-desk application suites, choose the right product for your corporate support. Here's how.
By Brad Hecht
While enterprises benefit from distributing critical data and business functions, IS struggles behind the scenes to manage and support the avalanche of new applications. To successfully support client-server systems, the help desk is evolving from a first-call-for-help technical troubleshooter to a single-point-of-contact service desk for both IT and non-IT issues. - Help-desk applications are no longer responsible simply
for tracking trouble tickets. Instead, today's tools must address a new set
of requirements for scalability, integration, and functionality, and be easily accessible by IS support personnel, IS management, end-user
peer-support staff, power users, and third-party service providers. -
What will be the net result? More than 50% of Fortune 1,000 companies will replace their help-desk systems by the year 2000. While these market changes represent good news for help-desk vendors (whose total market, according to research by Decision Drivers, a Gartner Group company in Stamford, Conn., will grow from approximately $600 million in 1996 to a projected $1.8 billion by 2000), it is bad news for IS organizations, which face significant internal and external challenges in selecting their next-generation service-desk application. Internally, upper management
expects better tools and higher service levels for less money; externally, the help-desk market is immature and fragmented, with almost 100 vendors claiming membership and no obvious market leader.
There are three main subsegments in help-desk products:midlevel
problem-management software, service-desk application suites, and
customer service and support (CSS) applications.
The midlevel problem-management group consists of lower-cost,
less-complex, but fully functional problem-management systems. Strengths include core problem-management and workflow capabilities, a robust user interface, strong expert systems and problem-resolution capabilities,
ease of installation, and low cost. On the down side, some of these
products don't scale to the enterprise level and have limited, if any, integration with other enterprise management and business applications, minimum service and support capabilities, and limited application functionality.
A problem-management tool can run right out of the box but typically
requires some installation, customization, and workflow setup.Costs begin around $1,000 and run as high as $60,000.
Service-desk application suites deliver a more robust and comprehensive set of help-desk applications, combining a wide range of integrated service-desk functions. Strengths include tight integration with legacy tools and enterprise network and systems-management applications; a product suite that includes problem, change, inventory, service-level agreement, and asset-management tools; broad server, client, and database support;
application scalability; and quality professional services and support.
Power At A Price
Along with this power, however, come high initial and ongoing
customization and integration costs, product complexity, and a lack of the usability features normally found in Windows applications. An enterprise service desk often requires significant customization, training, and installation. Costs often begin around $40,000 and may be as high as $500,000. In this category of product, however, functionality, services, and vendor viability are most important, and costs are not normally a deciding factor.
CSS applications store, track, and manage customer information to
support a customer-service call center, also called an external help desk.
Strengths include problem-management and resolution capabilities,
scalability, workflow capabilities, wide platform support, and integration with sales-force automation, logistics, quality assurance, field service, and enterprise business applications.
Like the midlevel problem-management products, CSS applications tend
to lack integration with enterprise-management applications, and like the enterprise service-desk applications, they lack ease of use, have initial and ongoing customization and training costs, and are complex. A CSS application often requires significant customization, training, and installation effort, and costs range from $80,000 to more than $1,000,000.
In this article, I examine only the first two categories, which focus on internal help desks.
Typically, IS focuses more than 90% of its product evaluation
onfunctionality and cost. But you should also consider the vendor's vision and its ability to execute, as well as the intermediate criteria of service and support.
Functionality can be divided into seven components:support for platforms, databases, and protocols; integration; external platform functionality;
internal platform functionality; problem-management capabilities; product architecture; and change or configuration management.
In your evaluation, make sure the product supports the server, client, and database platforms, and the protocols, required by your organization. Examine the ability of the core application to integrate with external applications, such as network and systems-management software, legacy help-desk tools, telephony tools, external knowledge bases, and service-desk tools.
A help-desk product should extend beyond the core application to
include reporting tools, application extensions, development toolkits,
internationalization support including time-zone and language support, and legacy-conversion tools. The core functions within the application should include an easy-to-use graphical user interface, as well as help system, expert system, and security, backup, and workflow capabilities.
Desirable problem-management capabilities include sorting capabilities, call and problem management, and remote problem management. Also examine how the application is distributed into client and server portions, database architecture, and scalability. Finally, to evaluate change- and configuration-management capabilities, look for change tracking, scheduling, notification, approval, impact analysis, and integration of change management with external applications.
Initial cost is almost always (incorrectly) one of the most heavily
weighted-and most elusive-evaluation criteria in selecting a service-desk application. Decision Drivers' research has shown that the initial cost of the help-desk tool often accounts for less than 25% of the total life-cycle cost, with most of the cost hidden in product training and customization. Your cost calculations should include not only initial product licenses but also knowledge-tool licenses, installation and maintenance, help-desk
gateways, ongoing education and training, and professional services such as customization and integration.
The strategic nature of the enterprise help-desk decision calls for a strenuous examination of the vendor's stated strategic direction. How will the vendor incorporate new and emerging technologies into its help-desk architecture? How will the vendor evolve its current help-desk application and add to or enhance its current functionality? What is the vendor's strategy to evolve its general and professional services support? How will the vendor fund its vision? What is the vendor's channel and alliance strategy?
A service and support evaluation should include your examination of the quality of the vendor's general support and of its professional services. General support criteria should include vendor product-installation capabilities, ongoing product support, vendor service, geographic availability, and quality of help-desk service. You can assess the quality of professional services by evaluating help-desk providers for their project-management, systems-integration, and business-consulting skills,
and aggressively demanding user references that closely match both their industry focus and their project scope.
The importance of the financial well-being of a potential partner cannot be
overemphasized. Use qualitative analysis and traditional Wall Street
metrics to examine the vendor's financial viability in absolute and relative terms. Selective metrics could include revenue, growth, margins, investment, quick ratio, etc. For a private company, aggressively seek financial information from the vendor under nondisclosure agreements. Also apply metrics that reveal the quality of the vendor's technical staff. How do the vendor's R&D efforts compare to those of other players? Is there high turnover among talented people?
To rate vendors relative to one another within the two primary internal
help-desk markets, Decision Drivers conducted a survey of several
hundred IS organizations to isolate their top selection criteria for each
help-desk market segment. Leading vendors were then evaluated and
rated relative to one another within each criteria based on analyst review, vendor input, and user validation.
Midlevel Problem Management
Within this sector, two groups of vendors emerged as leaders. Remedy
and Software Artistry, leading vendors of enterprise service-desk
software, also provide strong midlevel products. But they face tough
competition from two other vendors, Professional Help Desk (PHD) and
Magic Solutions.
Remedy, Software Artistry, and PHD led in database and platform
support-PHD because of its server-independent architecture and broad
database support, and Remedy and Software Artistry because of their
broad support at the server, client, and database levels, including support for a full range of Unix and Windows platforms.
Leaders in problem-management capabilities again were Software
Artistry, PHD, and Remedy, offering a range of both manual and
automated problem-tracking and management capabilities, including
problem assignment, notification, and closure by various categories. Those
scoring well or poorly in the chart on p. 54 provide adequate
problem-management capabilities but mostly lack the range of automated features shared by the three leading vendors.
All seven vendors provide good ad hoc, historical, and preconfigured
graphical- and text-reporting capabilities, but only Remedy combines
those features with its real-time Flashboards reporting tool, which pushes it into the lead.
Magic Solutions, PHD, Molloy Group, and Software Artistry all make a
strong showing in the GUI and ease-of-use category. These products
combine an intuitive user interface with features such as the ability to drag, drop, resize, and easily create windows and toolbars, embed multimedia components (audio, video, text, graphics) into the problem ticket, and provide news or hot flash windows for help-desk analysts.
An incredibly valuable feature is an embedded expert system. Three
products stand out in this respect-Molloy Group with Cognitive
Processor, PHD with Natural Intelligence, and Software Artistry, which combines its Adaptive Learning feature with a broad set of additional
expert systems capabilities.
Ideally, external knowledge bases-from vendors such as Serviceware Inc. in Pittsburgh, Knowledgebrokers Inc. in Carrollton, Texas, and
Microsoft-work hand-in-hand with the problem-resolution techniques
discussed earlier and are integrated into the help-desk vendors' core problem-resolution database. Bendata, Magic Solutions, and PHD all support these three knowledge bases, and at least three additional external knowledge sources.
Enterprise Service Desks
The enterprise service desk has its own set of differentiating criteria, as shown in the chart above. In the high-end market, Software Artistry and Peregrine Systems emerge as the functional leaders, while Remedy and McAfee combine above-average financial stability with a broad range of application integration capabilities.
Peregrine Systems, Remedy, and Software Artistry have the best platform and database support, with broad Unix and Windows platform support and comprehensive relational database coverage. Applix also stands out for its platform-independent application architecture.
McAfee, Peregrine, Software Artistry, and Remedy are distinguished in integration with enterprise-management because of their extensive
network- and systems-management integration, which ranges from
network-management applications such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView
and Cabletron's Spectrum to systems-management tools such as Tivoli's TME and CA-Unicenter TNG.
Knowledge-base support is not a differentiator for the enterprise service desk, and although all vendors have established relationships with the leading knowledge providers, Knowledgebrokers and Serviceware, none is as good in this area as the leaders in midlevel problem-management.
All scale to support a large enterprise implementation, but Peregrine,
Quintus, and Remedy have the best scalability, followed closely by
Software Artistry with its new three-tier client-server implementation.
Peregrine Systems and Software Artistry, the leaders in operational
change management, combine robust change tracking, scheduling,
notification, and approval with impact analysis to provide a
comprehensive and tightly integrated change- and problem-management
suite.
Three products shine in problem-resolution capabilities:Peregrine's IR
Expert, Platinum's Apriori expert system, and Software Artistry's
Adaptive Learning, with a broad range of expert systems support.
Platinum rates significantly above average for its professional services, while McAfee and Remedy rate above average in financial stability and ability to execute.
Brad Hecht is founding director and head of research for the technology acquisition research group of Decision Drivers Inc., a Gartner Group company in Stamford, Conn. He can be reached at bhecht@gartner.com. |
