This is a follow-up to the my previous post Saas Fever Catches On With ITIL Tool Vendors. Everyone has it, atleast in PR. I tried to look at a few emerging players, in this post, let look at all the ITSM players on Saas

What I mean by Saas? Please, providing Hosting Is NOT SAAS

Saas Apps need to multi-tenant, as a user should be able to sign up, try, and use it over a web browser without having to install or download products. It also means that service upgrade must be taken care of by the vendor. Hosting products or providing a data center where products are hosted and calling it On-demand is not Saas. It's PR hype trying to cash in Saas, It's BS.

SaaS ITIL Tools/ Vendors

Now that we have clearly defined what's Saas, it becomes really simple as there are a very few!

Service-Now : Service-now.com

Service-now really covers ITSM to a great extent. It's no surprise, as the founders are ex-Peregrine techies. They have built ITIL features in breadth and depth. Service-Now wants to play only the big league, Business Service Management stuff on the product and minimum price tag of $40k shows that they are shooting for the BMC, CA and HP, IBM league. The implementation is comprehensive, it is meant for large businesses moving away from the Big 4. I was curious to know how they managed the asset discovery as it's important step for populating the CMDB / CMS. This is the part where most vendors say you have to buy a third party discovery tool, that will increase your spend per asset. I found that they use scripts for asset discovery, cool. You don't have pay extra. They have all ingredients to win, 250 enterprise customers, 25 million in recurring revenues, a proven management team and a product on the spot. I think it is fair to say Service-now is the new leader in the "Saas Vendors in ITSM Space".

Watch Out:

Service-now is comprehensive but it is also complex. It's very hard to figure out where you want to start. It is not the Do-It-Yourself kinda stuff. I am sure Admins and team need a lot of training to figure this out. I don't blame them, in the ITIL-domain where the processes are well-defined, if you want to implement all the processes by the book, you will end up like this.

Price: Minimum contract price is $40,000 for support 35 processes. 

Beetil: 

Beetil is a Kick-ass startup from New Zealand. Beetil takes a less-is-more approach to ITIL. I see a lot of similarities with 37signals in terms of UI and less-is-more approach. The approach shows two things well, they understand ITIL and what their customers want. They have taken the key points of ITIL and implemented in a easy way for small business. This means that you will get all ITIL Service Support modules with a fresh and simple approach. You can get all the modules Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Configuration management made simple and for one price. I am not sure how you will populate the asset database. Guess you have to buy a discovery tool. This is a great product for SMB to get started with, there is no learning curve, they don't have to break their heads over ITIL jargons or implementing it. It just works.

Watch Out:

There is no categorization in incidents, problems. I am really not sure how users can pull out a report on how many incidents / problems came in because of a failure (particular type). 

Price: $25 per seat per month

As of I know that's it. In the pure play Saas, there are only two players each on opposite side spectrum.

Other Products / Services That Did Not Make It

Zendesk : 

Zendesk, a Helpdesk on Saas but they don't have ITIL.  They have the word Incident Management and Incident types will not transform a helpdesk into an ITIL Service Desk. Maybe a few other words too!.

Octopus Software:

Octopus Software:  A ITIL Software based and maybe technically fits the bill for a Saas app. Sylvain Hamel R&D Director got back with the advantages of Microsoft Smart Client Architecture. However in a world that is moving towards the web, the desktop UI is a BIG turn off. Personally, I will not call it a Saas app or will not recommend to my customers.