By Dick Stark

I’ve been in the ITSM business since co-founding Evergreen Systems in 1997.  Back then, Evergreen sold and supported a mid-market toolset, DP Umbrella, which eventually begat McAfee Help Desk which begat Magic, which finally became BMC Service Desk Express (SDE). We also sold an enterprise toolset, Software Artistry, which became Peregrine Service Center by way of IBM Tivoli. I didn’t really understand then why DP Umbrella which had 75% of the functionality of Software Artistry, sold for less than a third of what enterprises would pay for Software Artistry.

Fast-forward 17 years to today, and we have a similar dichotomy between Remedyforce and Remedy.  What compounds this is that most customers that purchase “enterprise-grade” ITSM toolsets have a Gartner ITSM maturity level of less than level 3.  This means that they have overspent for a product that they can’t take full advantage of anyway, What gives? And, what makes 1997 different from 2014?

First of all, no sizeable organization wants to admit that their maturity level is less than it should be and overcompensates, hoping that the enterprise toolset will make up for their lack of maturity.  The result is often frustration and occasionally blame directed towards the consulting firm and ITSM toolset vendor. What’s different in 2014 is financial transparency: cost matters, budgets are tighter, and organizations are now held accountable.

This means that Remedyforce and FootPrints Service Core, which offers a more rapid ROI (and other competing products like Cherwell and Easy Vista) could start to gain ground relative to the more expensive offerings like Remedy and ServiceNow. Today, RightStar has more than 200 Remedyforce implementations under its belt with customers ranging from mid-size businesses to large enterprises.  What’s noticeable is the growing number of large organizations that have switched to Remedyforce to meet their ITSM needs. For example, RightStar helped a Global 20 organization roll out a large enterprise Remedyforce call center, and assisted a Fortune 500 customer, implement a sizable BMC BPPM/ADDM service assurance and automation system that included Remedyforce as the ITSM toolset.  Indeed, we also recently assisted a large government agency with an organization-wide ITSM consolidation using Remedyforce as the ITSM centerpiece.

 What about the argument that Remedy and other Enterprise ITSM tools offer the most integration flexibility?  It is true that integrations to and from Remedy already exist for almost any type of product, but Remedyforce is not far behind. RightStar has already developed or assisted with integrations from Remedyforce to BMC systems such as FootPrints Asset Core, ADDM, BPPM, and Atrium Orchestrator.  Additionally, we’ve also integrated Remedyforce to non-BMC products such as SCCM, LANDesk, Altiris, Courion, Spiceworks, Active Directory, Cloud Coach, VersionOne, Lawson, and Workday.   This makes Remedyforce truly an enterprise ready ITSM toolset. Combine integration flexibility with rapid time to value, easy and fast upgrades, and the stability of the Force.com platform, and it’s a “no-brainer” to select Remedyforce for mid-size to large organizations looking for a SaaS based ITSM solution.