Forrester Says 2013 is the Breakout Year for SaaS ITSM – We second that!

 A new blog post from Forrester makes a statement that  I couldn’t agree with more:

2013 is the breakout year for SaaS!

The Forrester team explains that it came to the SaaS conclusion while attending the FUSION 13 conference, which is an annual, key conference for IT Service Management professionals. This year’s theme was “graduate to better service management,” and about 2000 IT service management professionals attended it. The team was then able to survey attendees about current trends and preferences.

From the answers, it became obvious that SaaS will dominate on-premise from now on.

 As Forrester puts it: “When asked how they plan to purchase management and automation software over the next two years, for the first time “Delivered via SaaS” rather than “Classic perpetual license” was the most popular choice.  As most of you know, SaaS has been on a tear for a couple of years now – it’s neat to finally see that reflected in the data.”

I’m happy and excited to see that IT professionals are finally catching on to the benefits of SaaS IT management solutions. Samanage has taken full advantage of the Cloud possibilities so that we can give our customers all of these benefits. Among them, is the ability for us to quickly deploy upgrades, meaning that all of our customers are always running the most up-to-date version. Our customers can also deploy the Samanage solution much faster than on-premise alternatives, so they enjoy very quick time to value.

Forrester also featured a few other interesting conclusions that we at Samanage have addressed before and seen ourselves. According to Forrester: “ITIL continues to have a positive impact on operational productivity, operational costs, and service quality.” We’ve extensively pressed the importance of ITIL service management in IT software because of exactly these benefits.

 An big issue that the conference attendees identified in IT was that IT’s reputation with the business is continuing to struggle. I’ve written before that aligning IT with business values could be the way to improve the reputation.

Another finding that I’m pleased about is that more IT professionals are creating a service catalog. As you can see in the graph, provided by Forrester, numbers are growing from last year. This makes perfect sense you take into account the many benefits that a service catalog can offer an organization. It is a great way to streamline service requests and shorten the service delivery process. A catalog enables a help desk team to hold one repository for all the services it offers across the company.

Below you can see how the numbers have increased.

As they explain: “Lack of funding is less of an issue for service catalog initiatives, and the number of ITSM professionals currently working on a service catalog grew. A service catalog is not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change.” Forrester predicts that in time “those who have realized the anticipated benefits of their service catalog will rise; it is an essential part of the service-centric organization.”

All this signals to me that good things are happening in IT service management and the SaaS movement is only going to accelerate in years to come!