I’ve been following service desk solutions for several years now – ever since I wrote the first review of Zendesk published in a mainstream blog (disclosure – the Zendesk folks have gone on to become good friends of mine and I also write for their Zengage blog). It seems I lucked upon a real growth area, despite taking these sorts of predictive reports with  grain of salt, it is worth mentioning that last year Gartner published a report estimating that by 2012, 10% of the IT service desk market will be made up of SaaS solutions.

I was interested then to spend some time talking with NTRglobal the other day. NTRglobal is a ten year veteran of delivering IT automation, system management and remote access to large enterprises. Today they’re launching their own service desk offering, in their case a modular on-demand set of applications aimed at providing asset management and the host of processes that surround it.

Aimed as it is for the enterprise market, NTR’s service desk is based around the ITIL framework that enterprise folks are used to. Service Desk enables them to:

  • Automate routine asset management tasks
  • Configure and manage assets, unattended devices and embedded systems – within the corporate network and beyond
  • Monitor and remediate events with on-demand remote support
  • Report on singular files or the entire universe of assets from an online console

The central management console itself is, as one would hope from a “true” cloud product, multi everything. Via an RIA the console is multi browser and platform and also includes a number of wizards for either automatic or manual deployment of the agent itself to corporate devices – this can be via LAN, WAN or OTA deployment.

ntr service desk

SaaS is a no-brainer for this sort of functional area. Asset management is all about providing a central console, and integrating with a number of different systems both inside and outside of the firewall. NTR have been smart taking he modular approach which means that organizations can take a piecemeal approach towards their software stack. As an example NTR Service Desk integrates with other tools touching IT service management such as salesforce.com and Zendesk, meaning that the asset management components can be tied to he CRM and support ticketing applications the organization uses.

While there are definitely some enterprise applications that will be late movers to SaaS. The entire asset management and service desk area is an obvious candidate for a cloud approach. By providing a product very much aimed at larger businesses (over 1000 employees) NTR is likely to hit a market ready for change as their existing tools from BMC and Remedy simply fail to meet their changing requirements.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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