The Service Desk Software Market

The service desk (SD) software market is a growth segment within the IT management software market, thanks to continued buyer attention — including a significant number of replacements of existing SD installations due to dissatisfaction with previous project results. The "big four" vendors — BMC Software, CA, HP, and IBM — are all now equipped to compete for SD business, but there is also a rich seam of midtier vendors that are able to win business by being more agile and promoting a better time-to-production than the larger solutions. Also, just as enterprise CRM is often run as a managed service, software-as-a-service (SaaS) is looming over the SD market for IT organizations; it will transform the market from a software business to a services one. SD vendors must recognize that SD/CRM is a business application project and that they must sell it differently than the traditional system management tools. Newer, associated functionalities around service request and service catalog management will become essential features of a successful SD solution in the future.