By Dick Stark

Since RightStar supports many mid-size customers, I attended Midsize Enterprise Summit this week held in Phoenix.  More than 200 CIO’s from mid-market firms also attended this event.  (In case you’re wondering, Gartner defines an average mid-market firm as 17 IT employees, 1800 employees and $270M in total revenue.) I sat in on a presentation from Gartner VP and Fellow, David Cearley about Gartner’s Top Ten Strategies for 2013, which he claims won’t change significantly for 2014.  Here’s how several of those trends apply to the ITSM space.

(1)   Mobile Device Battles. David reported that by the end of the year, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web accessible device. There is no apparent winner—prepare for heterogeneity for years to come, and expect only 20 percent of those devices to be Windows based. That’s good, since BMC’s MyIT supports iPhone and Android native apps in its most current release. I predict that 2014 will see more widespread acceptance of MyIT as companies roll out application for end-users that allow them to simplify and improve their experience with the corporate IT service desk. (MyIT is a new BMC app that empowers your end-users to ensure they always have access to the right technology and support services, no matter where they are.)

(2)   Mobile Apps & HTML 5. Coincidently, this was the week that Apple released IOS 7 to existing iPad and iPhone users. While the overall reaction was mixed, no one would disagree that the appearance of the new operating system was much improved.  Especially significant was the slight “tweak” in the user interface significantly improving the user experience.

BMC also released an HTML5 version of MyIT, designed to merge the desktop and mobile experience.  With this enhancement, users in an organization could manage their IT requests from three different devices—for example, iPhone, iPad, and desktop.  This is a significant update for MyIT. It’s even possible that small companies might use MyIT solely for incident and knowledge management since MyIT comes with an AR server license.

(3)   Enterprise App Store.  With BMC’s recent acquisition of Partnerpedia, it is clear that BMC will offer customizable app stores for companies to distribute their own and other apps in a centralized location.  For those organizations that already have service catalogs, employee benefit portals, and so on, this seems like a logical next addition.

(4)   Hybrid Clouds. There continues to be real interest, especially in the mid-market space in moving applications and services to the cloud. Hybrid clouds allow organizations to move some applications to the cloud while keeping and integrating to existing on-premise servers and applications.  For example, RightStar is hosting FootPrints Asset Core for a large retailer due to the horsepower required and complexity of the infrastructure necessary to support thier 30,000 stores.  (To do this, we’ve teamed with Rackspace to offer a hosted version of Asset Core.)  The retail organization decided to keep their Service Core on-premise, but we’ve integrated it to Asset Core “in the cloud.” to enable service desk technicians to connect to each store to troubleshoot or download software.

One thing is certain: IT is becoming more and not less complex so service desk software offerings must continue to evolve to support the changing trends and technologies in the IT space.