I attended a local itSMF meet-up last week that focused not just on ITIL, but on DevOps concepts like organizational agility, collaboration, experimentation, and flexibility. DevOps is a discipline that is all about speed, faster time to market, real sense of urgency, “modernizing IT,” and doing more with less. Culture, tools, and vision now must all be managed alongside legacy ITIL processes of service design and service operation. At the center of the DevOps movement is Atlassian with its suite of software development and collaboration products, including Jira Service Desk (JSD), which was designed for agile teams from the onset.

When RightStar began as an Atlassian partner three years ago, JSD was really positioned as an ITSM tool for Jira customers already using Jira Software. Since then Atlassian has achieved Pink certification for four modules: Request Fulfillment, and Incident, Problem, and Change Management. But, since then, RightStar has received orders from new customers that purchased JSD as a new ITSM tool. These organizations realized the value that JSD brings independent of Jira Software. What makes JSD work so well when competing with the likes of ServiceNow? Plenty. Here is my list:

• Focus on Agility. An important component of Agile is communication. JSD with its HipChat ecosystem, allows agents to “swarm” a problem to provide a quick fix.
• StatusPage keeps customers informed 24/7 about the status of critical services they depend upon.
• Modern use interface that lets customers submit requests, or
• Add Confluence to get an integrated knowledge base.
• Available in a SaaS or on-premise options.
• Only Salesforce has more third party applications available than Atlassian’s Marketplace which has more than 700 different apps for JSD alone.
• RightStar’s ScanStar for Jira offers barcode scanning compatible with Insight, Atlassian’s CMDB.
• Scalability to support very large enterprises. A current government account has grown to more than 90,000 Jira users in just five years.
• Minimal support costs. That same agency supports JSD with a team of just five consultants.
• Good value. Atlassian advertises that a large enterprise could save enough to buy a small island by moving from ServiceNow to JSD.