BMC have added a "low end" help desk to its portfolio of products as a result of its recent acquisition of Numara. Track It! has 60,000 customers worldwide so it is a proven solution that provides a comprehensive IT Service Management suite that includes Help Desk, Inventory, Change, Self-Service, Reporting and Dashboards, to empower the small to medium enterprises.

The Track-IT! family is a cost-effective range of products that can be installed in hours and configured for your business in a day or so and has a low cost of administration. Although it is a comprehensive solution for small and medium enterprises, it is not an ITIL aligned solution.

So if you need a proven help desk solution, without ITIL alignment, for a small number of users that can be up and running in a day or so, for a great price, Track It! worth trying out.

Mark Lyttle
Chief Executive Officer

Since its introduction more than 15 months ago, customers have adopted the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution quicker than any other competitor offering within a similar timeframe. According to BMC, a large, internet-based financial institution recently selected Remedyforce over other solutions from companies like ServiceNow. Customers take advantage of best-practice alignment, which affords them the speed, efficiency and lower operational costs of a cloud application with the standardization and scalability of ITIL-based processes.

In addition to the strength of the BMC platform, enterprises using the BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution benefit from inherent social, mobile and real-time capabilities of salesforce.com's Force.com platform and the advanced social collaboration capabilities of Salesforce Chatter.

According to Gartner, "The SaaS/Cloud deployment method for IT service desk tools is quickly becoming a viable option to replace on-premises-only toolsets. Gartner inquiry and customer feedback clearly support the idea that the Cloud is rapidly becoming an accepted licensing and deployment model. Industry analysts cite a variety of reasons for an organization to consider the Cloud, including financial capital considerations, maintenance and resources."

Regular readers of The Fusion Blog know that while we believe that Saas based Service Desks are a viable model, we recommend a thorough analysis of all relevant factors to determine whether it correct for you.

Mark Lyttle
Chief Executive Officer

In February 2012 BMC Software acquired Numara Software, makers of Footprints and Track It. BMC has now announced their plans for their mid-market ITSM solutions including Footprints and BMC Service Desk Express.

BMC Software has decided that Numara FootPrints, to be known as BMC FootPrints, will become BMC’s preferred on-premise product to address the needs of mid-sized organizations. FootPrints is a proven solution with thousands of customers and in 2011 Numara won the Service Desk Institute Supplier of the Year Award.

However BMC Software has announced a very generous support window for BMC Service Desk Express users. BMC will continue to provide full support for BMC Service Desk Express for the next 3 years and limited support for a further 2 years.

Indeed the next release, v10.2, is targeted for June 2012 and will provide improved Firefox support, integration with Microsoft Reporting Services and Right Answers Knowledge Management as well as updates for Self-Service and Mobility.

For BMC Service Desk Express users interested in a Software as a Service (Saas) solution, then they are invited to consider Remedyforce and can expect a significant discount.

Remedyforce is based on a robust relationship with Salesforce.com and is built on their Force.com platform. As well as Incident Management and self-service, it also includes knowledge management, change management and ITIL Best Practices and can be implemented rapidly.

For supported BMC Service Desk Express users migrating to BMC Footprints, they can expect a 95% discount on the list price of licenses of BMC Footprints and a maintenance cost that is the same as their existing BMC Service Desk Express maintenance.

Overall BMC have come up with options for their customers that look attractive.

Mark Lyttle
CEO