According to a recent report by Global Industry Analysts, the ITSM global market is projected to reach USD $5 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 8.9%—up from USD $3 billion in 2020. This growth is driven by a number of factors, including enterprises moving to hybrid digital infrastructures. These infrastructures require IT managers to oversee an increasing array of operational processes while ITSM vendors continue to differentiate themselves with advanced ITSM capabilities to incorporate business workflows, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual agents, chatbots, machine learning (ML), and greater ease of use.
What is ITSM Software?
ITSM is a set of software, tools, and approaches utilized by ITOps managers and leaders to better manage the workflows and tasks that underpin the delivery of IT services. These tasks include IT service and help desks and oversight of enterprise IT operations and infrastructures, all of which is aimed at providing comprehensive enterprise IT management while increasing productivity and efficiency, reducing operational costs, and improving the customer experience and satisfaction.
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How Do You Choose an ITSM Tool?
Here are key features to consider when choosing ITSM tools and software:
- Incident Management: Many types of incidents can occur in IT. Some are vitally important, while many are not. Incident management should be able to help IT identify priorities with automation features that simplify the process.
- Change Management: The number of changes taking place within the IT infrastructure can be confusing. If they are not tracked, a great many challenges are likely to result. For example, if a server virtualization project is initiated without detailing all the processes, services, storage connections, and dependencies involved, chaos could erupt. The latest change management modules sometimes provide risk analysis to highlight potential issues in advance.
- Service Desk: A service desk provides a point of contact to ensure users receive help for requests that can vary from the routine to full-blown emergencies.
- Problem Management: Problem management assists IT via processes and activities that manage the lifecycle of problems that could happen in an IT service. The purpose is to prevent problems from happening and resolve incidents rapidly.
- Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management is all about maintaining an accurate record of all information about the many configuration items (CIs) required to deliver an IT service as well as their dependencies and relationships.
Top ITSM Tools and Vendors
Based on the trends outlined in aforementioned reports and interviews with vendors, we have compiled a list of the leading ITSM platforms, with additional guidance for verticals like managed service providers (MSPs) and small businesses. Here are our picks for top ITSM software.
BMC Helix
BMC Software has arranged its ITSM suite in alignment with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices. The BMC Helix Suite includes modules for chatbot, digital workplace, discovery, ITSM, business workflows, and cloud-native microservices. It also comes with built-in AI and ML capabilities. Users can choose to deploy it on-premises, SaaS, multi-cloud, and hybrid. Its ITSM module can run on a choice of public clouds (AWS, Azure, IBM, BMC).
Key Differentiators
- Incident Management: Create and resolve incidents faster with intelligent, context-aware, and proactive incident matching.
- Problem Management: ITIL 4-compliant best practices for service management processes that embed mature practices into the user experience and back-end workflow.
- Change Management: Simplified change request processes with a guided process on mobile and web, drag-and-drop change calendar, and automated and contextual collision detection and impact analysis.
- Service Asset/Configuration Management: Scalable, service view configuration management for IT operations management (ITOM). Offers class structure, data and service models, federation, reconciliation and normalization, and agentless application and dependency mapping.
- Service Desk: Support a variety of service request workloads at scale, such as customer service in large banks.
- Analytics: BMC Helix ITSM has cognitive capabilities that automate classification, assignment, and routing of incidents as well as provides cognitive email analysis and response.
- Extension Beyond IT: Ability to track operating level agreements and contracts from external providers. It also extends to HR, facilities, and procurement.
- Market Strength: BMC has the largest enterprise installed base for core ITSM services. Not aimed at the SME market.
- Pricing: BMC offers a free trial with enterprise pricing available upon request.
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM is a three-tiered cloud-optimized, scalable ITSM solution for automating workflows. The company’s Foundational tier offers easy-to-use incident management for dealing with inbound ticket requests; followed by the addition of the Intermediate tier to provide change and configuration management for IT service desk and ITOps; and rounds out with the Comprehensive tier to add greater management—including service level, financial, portfolio, and project management among others.
Key Differentiators
- Incident Management: Ivanti provides fast, flexible incident management including analytics to deal with inbound ticket requests from any channel.
- Problem Management: Problem management utilizes information from other elements within the enterprise for automated problem resolution processes.
- Change Management: Ivanti offers user configurable support of change workflow and business processes and enough flexibility to modify or create new change workflows.
- Service Asset/Configuration Management: Service asset and configuration management enable the handling of IT changes quickly and efficiently.
- Service Desk: Ivanti was the original service desk solution in the 1980s. It includes dashboards, reporting, knowledge management, mobility, self service, and more.
- Analytics: Review events over selected time periods, track mean time between failure (MTBF) for assets and services, and report service availability against service-level agreements.
- Extension Beyond IT: Ivanti tracks external providers’ operating level agreements and the underpinning contracts.
- Market Strength: Ideal for organizations looking for a single solution to synchronize IP telephony/PBX and ITSM. Strong in healthcare, higher education, manufacturing, retail, and legal.
- Pricing: Ivanti offers a free cloud trial, while price quotes are provided by call or email.
EasyVista Service Manager
The EasyVista Enterprise Service Management Platform includes ITSM, Enterprise Process Automation (service manager), Advanced Intelligent Knowledge Management (self help), and Micro Apps technology (for building apps, portals, and dashboards). It is available as SaaS and on-premises.
Key Differentiators
- Incident Management: Automatic knowledge search locates any related known errors, knowledge articles, news, or major incidents. Resolutions from knowledge can be copied to current incidents.
- Problem Management: Alerts can be received from third-party monitoring tools, analyzed, and can trigger events such as a simple recording of the events, a notification, or the creation of an incident.
- Change Management: Changes are categorized based on change catalog records that also define the related workflow. Impact analysis lets you understand the impact of a change based on the CMDB relationship.
- Service Asset/Configuration Management: Assets and configuration items (CIs) are linked to define the dependency map. Business services are tracked and linked to CIs.
- Service Desk: Request management starts with the service catalog. Workflows are configured and associated with every service.
- Analytics: Microsoft Cognitive Services are used to interpret user needs.
- Extension Beyond IT: EasyVista Service Manager is used to support the offering and delivery of various enterprise services such as IT, HR, and facilities.
- Market Strength: EasyVista is primarily focused on the small and medium-size enterprise (SME) market with many customers in the public sector, education, healthcare, and insurance. It is strongest in the European market.
- Pricing: EasyVista offers a free demo with pricing provided on request.
CA Clarity Service Manager
CA Technologies (now owned by Broadcom) is a veteran of the ITSM market. Its ITSM solution, known as Clarity Service Manager, offers intelligent search, chatbots, improved routing, automation, sentiment analysis, and image analysis. It includes a variety of service workflows and is particularly strong on analytics, work prioritization, knowledge management, portal development, mobile capabilities, and camera support. In addition, ML aids in queue awareness and automatic categorization of incidents and requests.
This ITSM tool is on-premises only and part of a larger suite, which includes additional products. Its multi-tenancy approach makes it popular among MSPs.
Key Differentiators
- Incident Management: Incident generation can be automated through integrations with email systems, command line interfaces, web services, event monitoring, and CTI tools.
- Problem Management: You can create a standalone problem, a problem from an incident, and attach an incident to a problem. You can also select the impacted CI.
- Change Management: CA Technologies includes a robust CMDB and integrations between the service desk and Clarity Configuration Automation, Clarity Service Operations Insight, and Clarity Client Automation.
- Service asset/configuration Management: Integration between Clarity APM and Clarity SM enables sharing of business-critical information to form a view of assets and CIs.
- Service Desk: Mobility and collaborative self-service bring users together to share information and resolve issues on their favorite devices, often without opening a ticket.
- Analytics: xFlow gives analysts the ability to understand the complete state of the IT environment, a way to prioritize work, and the context to make decisions.
- Extension Beyond IT: Users have begun to leverage it for a variety of use cases, such as HR, procurement, and facilities.
- Market Strength: CA Technologies has traction with MSPs that use the product to service many hundreds of clients. Overall, it is primarily a large enterprise solution.
- Pricing: Contact sales for software and hardware pricing.
Micro Focus Service Management Automation X
Micro Focus SMAX is a single suite for ITSM, enterprise service management, and IT asset management. It incorporates containers and Kubernetes to decrease ticket volumes as well as automated service support for IT and non-IT processes, workflows, and tasks based on ML and analytics. It can be run in the cloud (AWS, Azure, Google) or on-premises or consumed as a service. It drives change management by using prescriptive analytics to decrease change failures and reduce service outages.
SMAX has codeless configuration and can help develop new applications without developer skills. A self-service portal comes with social collaboration as the single point of contact for business and IT users for support and requests. Intelligent search, chatbots, and a strong CMDB are included.
Key Differentiators
- Incident Management: Restore normal service operation, access incidents from the landing page, automate reporting and track incidents, and issue alerts or escalate an incident.
- Problem Management: Identify the underlying reasons for one or more related incidents, enabling IT teams to create workarounds, identify known errors and define solutions.
- Change Management: Create and manage requests for change to the service assets and configured items registered in the CMDB by providing templates and change models to implement changes.
- Service Asset/Configuration Management: SMAX helps you organize and track the individual assets that support business services.
- Service Desk: The service desk is a centralized location for all employee issues related to IT. Its interface enables users to independently request support, search a self-help knowledge base, and browse a service catalog.
- Analytics: SMAX comes with an embedded Micro Focus IDOL Intelligent Data Operating Layer, which allows for the search and processing of text taken from both structured data and unstructured human information.
- Extension Beyond IT: Micro Focus SMAX includes enterprise service management features to extend ITSM to other business services.
- Market Strength: Micro Focus SMAX is primarily aimed at large-scale environments with higher process maturity and strong regulatory compliance reporting and audit requirements.
- Pricing: In addition to a 14-day free trial, Micro Focus offers pricing on request.
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