Seven Essentials for a Top-Performing IT Help Desk
By Ujjwal Sood, product analyst, ManageEngine
The help desk forms the backbone of IT operations for many federal, state and
local government agencies. In fact, the cross-functional nature of its
operation means the help desk directly impacts productivity and is an
essential part of what enables an agency to meet its stakeholder needs.
However, owing to increasingly complex IT environments, managers struggle to
ensure that their help desks are operating at optimum efficiency. This
seven-point guide will help IT managers ensure their help desks deliver
exceptional service while maximizing productivity.
1. Create the right structure: Properly structuring an IT help desk can
greatly improve its efficiency. Organize help desks into multiple levels or
tiers. In a three-tier help desk, for example, tier 0 can be a self-serv... (more)
You may not realize it, but your house is getting smarter. Devices that were
once entirely manually controlled, whether it's your thermostat, the locks on
your doors, or your porch lights, are now entering an era of autonomy, and
the list of devices in the home automation spectrum is continuing to grow.
Now that the masses are armed with smartphones, why shouldn't you be able to
control your home...when you're not home?
Home automation is getting more advanced, smarter, and more streamlined by
the day. When you flip a light switch, you expect that light bulb to turn on
instantly. For a home automation solution, you need that exact same
functionality when controlling your home from a smartphone app; the same
speed and reliability.
It's gone beyond just being able to schedule your lights to turn on at a
certain time. Users now expect to be able to monitor their home's... (more)
Worldwide server shipments were up 1.4% in Q2, according to Gartner, but paid
less. Revenues were off 2.9%.
HP, which sells more servers than anybody else, was down 5% on both shipments
and revenues.
Server ships in the US were up 8.4% bringing in revenues up 6.5%.
Gartner blames delayed buying ahead of new introduction and spending
constraints. IBM, for instance, just brought out its new System zEC12
mainframes this week and new Unix boxes are coming. One can't help but wonder
if virtualization is also having an impact.
Gartner is expecting a return to single-digit growth.
IDC was more negative.
By its count vendors shipped two million servers, down 3.6%, the first
shipment decline in three years. Revenues were down 4.8% to $12.6 billion.
Industry-standard servers were off 7.6% at the high end ($250,000 or more)
and 11.2% in the mid-range. Counting all sizes, 1.9 ... (more)
Neebula Systems and dbMaestro announce a free webinar on January 23 that will
provide advice on best practices for managing change when applying DevOps
concepts and agile development methodologies to rapidly develop, test and
deploy applications.
"We'll provide tips to ensure that rapid application iteration does not come
at the expense of availability or performance, which can turn DevOps into
Dev-Oops," said Ariel Gordon, co-founder and vice president of products at
Neebula. "We'll show how combining development and operations, along with
automation can deliver better, faster IT services."
The webinar will show how to take advantage of faster DevOps concepts while
applying automation to better control changes and further improve
productivity. The webinar will cover:
Understanding the inter-relationships of IT infrastructure and applications;
Reducing risk with ch... (more)
Neebula Systems announced four recent customer implementations as more
companies are investing in automated information technology (IT) operations
to help improve their availability of IT services.
Among them - Amdocs, Bechtel, Raritan, San Antonio Water System - are medium-
to large-size enterprises representing a variety of industries.
"Neebula is focused on delivering software that helps our customers address
the issue of maintaining uptime so that their business operations continue
uninterrupted," said Yuval Cohen, CEO of Neebula. "As a result, we're seeing
sales momentum building as enterprises recognize that their traditional
approach to IT operations doesn't stack up in today's complex, virtualized,
cloud-based computing environments."
The most recent customers to adopt Neebula ServiceWatch software include:
Amdocs with 20,000 employees and headquarters in Mis... (more)
Neebula Systems, a provider of business-level service modeling, management,
and automated full-stack discovery and dependency mapping solutions, invites
customers to preview the Neebula ServiceWatch solution in the cloud. For
the first time, IT managers will be able to use a Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS)-based product to quickly and effectively discover and map IT resources
- hardware and software - that make up a specific business service. This
eliminates the long, labor-intensive process of installing on-premise
software and then manually discovering and mapping IT resources.
Neebula ServiceWatch is a top-down, business-level discovery and dependency
mapping product which leverages patented technology to automate the entire
service modeling process, requiring no manual intervention. Neebula
ServiceWatch employs the service models to assist IT administrators in
m... (more)
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley $800 Savings here!
The IT industry is on the cusp of a new cloud computing era. The '90s were
focused on e-business, the late 2000s on IT as a Service, and we are now
entering the era of "everything as a service." IT has become business service
centric, a service broker for the enterprise, resulting in a new business
model for IT. IT organizations that fail to change the fundamentals of how
they get work done risk becoming marginalized.
In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Bury, vice
president of Software as a Service for the Software & Solutions organization
at HP , will discuss why it's imperative for IT to become business service
focused and how to ensure risk mitigation, cost optimization and
differentiation.
Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities !
Speaker Bio:
Kevin Bury is vice president of Softw... (more)
Since the 1970s, authors like Alvin Toffler[1], Daniel Bell[2] and John
Naisbitt[3] have predicted the post-industrial society. They forecast the end
of the industrial era and the dominance of services and information. This is
not a new message; the entire service provider industry has reformed around
this idea, and in the USA today non-manufacturing industries account for
almost 90 percent of the economy. Virtually every product today has a service
component to it and many products have been transformed into services.
One of the most interesting examples of this is the Amazon Kindle service
which provides an integrated front end to a wide range of Amazon services.
The Kindle service optimizes purchases of books plus access to library and
new services and automatically synchronizes all the devices the user may use
to access the services including the Kindle reader, s... (more)
Red Hat has released a public preview of its OpenStack IaaS distribution a
couple of weeks after Rackspace got the ball rolling and went production with
the open source stuff on its own public cloud.
Red Hat, the third-biggest contributor to the current Essex release, is being
a bit more circumspect about it. Its stuff is unsupported at this point.
It says it’s making sure the thing is enterprise-worthy, stable and
certified apropos of introducing it as an enterprise subscription product.
Whether Essex meets those criteria is reportedly debatable but Red Hat
maintains that it will be the “industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack
distribution.”
Red Hat is betting on the hybrid cloud and expects OpenStack to be an
important component of its hybrid cloud architecture by letting an IT
organization stand up a cloud at a service provider.
Apparently it’s got an early g... (more)
Enterprise information technology (IT) staffs spend significant time
struggling to keep up with change management, as well as trying to improve
overall end-user service quality. To address these issues, IT managers have
implemented service modeling projects, which have helped make some progress
but there is still far from universal satisfaction, according to a new survey
by Neebula Systems.
Organizations with more than 500 employees were asked about their priorities
in managing IT operations, as well as objectives for and satisfaction with
the results of service modeling projects. The responses indicated that
service modeling becomes more difficult as data centers become more complex
and that IT professionals are employing lots of different technologies to
address their issues.
Neebula is the leading provider of business-level service modeling,
management, and au... (more)
In a previous blog on Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB), I promised to return
briefly to the topic of CSB monetization.
The term CSB can refer to both to the activity of brokering cloud services,
or to the software application (or suite of applications) used to manage that
activity. The activity of brokering cloud services can be carried out within
an enterprise, as an internal support function, or performed as a paid-for
service by a third party. So just to be clear, the discussion in today's blog
is all about the monetization of CSB as a service when provided by a CSB
service provider.
The scope of CSB need not be limited to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). To
provide a complete cloud service, a broker might also offer IaaS and/or PaaS.
The CSB service might also include desktop tools to help the customer, and
also some good old-fashioned consulting.
The CSB may be a ... (more)
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