Market Overview: IT Service Management Support Tools

The service desk market generated more than $1.3 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow at about 10%. This market segment has experienced very little innovation in the past few years. The goals of service desk customers are primarily to improve customer satisfaction and reduce service desk staffing costs. Both of these goals are reached through implementation of process improvements — or entirely new processes — that streamline the work for the service desk team. Additionally, pressure to justify costs drives the need for financial measures and data to prove the value of the service desk to the organization. The market is filled with vendors that have all developed tools that look very similar. The fundamental processes of incident and problem management are comparable across these solutions, but ease of use and implementation time offer some differentiation.