By Dick Stark

Just this week RightStar held a private webinar for several SDE customers interested in FootPrints, BMC’s new on-premise service desk solution acquired through their recent acquisition of Numara. The customer feedback was positive as FootPrints offers a wide range of capability, especially when combined with its asset discovery and management tool. RightStar is quickly jumping on the FootPrints bandwagon to support existing SDE accounts and new customers.  Here are several reasons why we should all be excited.

FootPrints is flexible and easy to configure.  RightStar is investing in two weeks of FootPrints training per consultant this month. With this certification training (and some shadowing), we will be able to easily configure FootPrints to meet specific customer requirements based upon the ITIL framework. Additionally, an integration engine allows synchronization with other applications and databases such as LDAP.

FootPrints is extensible.  Asset Lifecycle Management is a process that when done well, can return thousands of dollars to the organization. FootPrints allows for easy automation of asset management processes to better enforce good ITIL configuration management processes such as IT asset purchasing, inventory, deployment, and disposal. Likewise, desktop management can be a difficult task, especially for an IT department that is understaffed. By automating those processes that discover and update operating system software and applications, hundreds of manual hours can be saved. Additionally dependency mapping between hardware and software applications can be easily viewed and built, making troubleshooting easier.

SaaS is not for everyone. FootPrints is BMC’s on-premise solution for the mid-market space. For those mid-sized customers not ready or comfortable to move to the cloud (maybe due to security or control reasons), FootPrints is the best thing going. It provides an all-in-one solution combining, Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Knowledge, Self-Service, and Service Catalog.

RightStar’s value proposition for our FootPrints accounts will be significant. First, like Remedy, SDE, and Remedyforce, RightStar provides up-front ITIL based consulting, design, implementation, and training services. We have years of service management consulting experience and will be able to implement FootPrints quickly and effectively.

Second, RightStar has a huge head start in configuration management and barcode scanning compared to our competitors. There is no BMC or third party barcode scanning interface for Footprints and we are moving quickly to roll out ScanStar for FootPrints.

Third, we have an experienced L1 support team that is learning FootPrints so we can provide remote administrative and support services.

Finally, as we get to know FootPrints, other ideas for additional services will emerge.  For example, the FootPrints Service catalog will allow RightStar to offer our customers a “shopping cart” experience for IT products and services. This is something every IT organization is interested in and something we will propose to every new FootPrints prospect.