Eliminate Service Desk Express upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS

Is the cost of annual software maintenance, consultants and upgrade fees for BMC Service Desk Express too high?

BMC Service Desk Express Suite customers face a resource-intensive and expensive proposition to continue to maintain their service desk application.

With Giva, BMC Service Desk Express customers on average experienced a:

• 45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was  45% less than BMC annual maintenance)
• 90% decrease in implementation time and cost
• Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
• Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Click for a TCO or ROI Analysis

Click to watch a video of Giva eHelpDesk

Here are the Last Few Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk/Customer Service Software Package.

Of course, with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) can save you a lot of money and SaaS vendors can get you up and running faster than deploying software on your own infrastructure. Our main point is that building your own help desk or customer service application really makes little economic sense. There are many products that are commercially available. Surely, there are a number of products that can meet your needs. We see many companies live to regret trying to build and maintain a product on their own.

Reason Four: You will have access to patches, updates, user groups, updated documentation, and technical support when the product is released and when you need it.

Reason Three: No matter how good the training, and no matter how great the documentation, sooner or later you will need to call the vendor’s technical support. This need usually arises at the worst possible time and inevitably involves a customer. Developers are busy people and you have to ask yourself if the in-house developers will be available when you need them. Most vendors have help desks that are open 24/7 and are literally waiting for your call.

Reason Two: Updates. A purchased product is continually updated, debugged and readied for your immediate use. With an in-house product your staff will usually be debugging the update after it is installed. This is not fair to your staff, your customers, or your boss.

Reason One: You can purchase, train on and implement a purchased product in a fraction of the time it takes to design, code, document, train on and implement an in-house product. A software development project can easily take on a life of its own and by developing an in-house product you are competing with paying customers. Unless you work for one of those unique companies mentioned earlier and unless your help desk can command the resources it needs, when it needs them, the chances are that in-house development will be prohibitively costly, time consuming, frustrating to train on and difficult to implement.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

Here are the next few reasons to buy a help desk or customer service application vs. building your own:

Reason Seven: Help desk software packages can be easily customized to meet your support operation’s unique needs. You won’t get this capability in an in-house product without a great deal of extra work and time.

Reason Six: The product you purchase will have voluminous documentation that is both technical and end-user oriented. It may even have CBT disks available and will certainly have on-site as well as off-site training programs available to train your staff. An in-house product will rarely have such documentation.

Reason Five: The documentation and training will be at least three times better with a purchased product than it will be with an in-house product. You will not have to compete with the internal documentation and training staff that get paid to serve paying customers.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

In a poor economy, we get this question a lot. What should I do, build or buy a help desk or customer service application?

What Do You Get With A Purchased Product?
The short answer is, a lot. Help desk software vendors spend millions of dollars and months of effort in determining what features go into their products. In addition, their sales, marketing, and technical support staffs have an intimate knowledge of help desk operations, trends, and requirements.

Here are the Top Ten Reasons You Should Purchase a Help Desk Software Package:

Reason Ten: The product already exists and you won’t have to spend time, money and political capital negotiating with a development executive to liberate already scarce resources.

Reason Nine: The vendor you choose has an understanding of how help desks work and what they need in a software package. Developers don’t always have this understanding and explaining it to them can take time, and time is money.

Reason Eight: Almost every help desk software package in the world can be purchased in modules. You can add and delete modules based upon your business needs and budget.

See our white papers at https://www.givainc.com/resources/wp/it-help-desk-software-cloud-whitepapers/

BMC Remedy Cost Relief

Eliminate Remedy upgrades & software maintenance with Giva SaaS 

Is the very high cost of BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS) consulting, upgrades and software maintenance not in your IT budget?

BMC Remedy customers face a resource-intensive complex re-implementation to upgrade to version 7.x. Remedy 7 is a code "rewrite" and requires a complete re-implementation and customization. 

With Giva, Remedy customers on average experienced a:

• 45% decrease in annual maintenance cost (Giva annual subscription cost was 45% less than Remedy annual maintenance)
• 90% decrease in implementation time and cost
• Eliminated all servers, software and upgrade costs
• Decreased headcount required to maintain service desk application

Get a quote from your BMC Remedy consultant and then contact Giva.

Giva will prepare a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Analysis and a Return-On-Investment Analysis (ROI) detailing how much money and headcount your company will save over the next 3 years.

See the following link for details and watch the 2 minute video on Giva's new Dashboard.

https://www.givainc.com/customers/compare/bmc-remedyforce-alternative-replacement-reviews-ratings/

According to Microsoft, cloud architectures generally can be classified as belonging to one of four "maturity levels," whose key attributes are configurability, multi-tenant efficiency, and scalability. Each level is distinguished from the previous one by the addition of one of those three attributes:

• Level 1 - Ad-Hoc/Custom: At the first level of maturity, each customer has its own customized version of the hosted application and runs its own instance of the application on the host's servers. Migrating a traditional non-networked or client-server application to this level of SaaS typically requires the least development effort and reduces operating costs by consolidating server hardware and administration.

• Level 2 - Configurable: The second maturity level provides greater program flexibility through configurable metadata, so that many customers can use separate instances of the same application code. This allows the vendor to meet the different needs of each customer through detailed configuration options, while simplifying maintenance and updating of a common code base.

• Level 3 - Configurable, Multi-Tenant-Efficient: The third maturity level adds multi-tenancy to the second level, so that a single program instance serves all customers. This approach enables more efficient use of server resources without any apparent difference to the end user, but ultimately is limited in its scalability.

• Level 4 - Scalable, Configurable, Multi-Tenant-Efficient: At the fourth and final SaaS maturity level, scalability is added through a multitier architecture supporting a load-balanced farm of identical application instances, running on a variable number of servers. The system's capacity can be increased or decreased to match demand by adding or removing servers, without the need for any further alteration of application software architecture.

Virtualization also may be used in SaaS architectures, either in addition to multi-tenancy, or in place of it. One of the principal benefits of virtualization is that it can increase the system's capacity without additional programming. On the other hand, a considerable amount of programming may be required to construct a more efficient, multi-tenant application. Combining multi-tenancy and virtualization provides still greater flexibility to tune the system for optimal performance. In addition to full operating system-level virtualization, other virtualization techniques applied to SaaS include application virtualization and virtual appliances.

Various types of software components and frameworks may be employed in the development of SaaS applications. These tools can reduce the time to market and cost of converting a traditional on-premise software product or building and deploying a new SaaS solution. Examples include components for subscription management, grid computing software, web application frameworks, and complete SaaS platform products.

The key characteristics of cloud software, according to IDC, include:

• network-based access to, and management of, commercially available software
• activities that are managed from central locations rather than at each customer's site, enabling customers to access applications remotely via the Web
• application delivery that typically is closer to a one-to-many model (single instance, multi-tenant architecture) than to a one-to-one model, including architecture, pricing, partnering, and management characteristics
• centralized feature updating, which obviates the need for downloadable patches and upgrades.
• Cloud is often used in a larger network of communicating software - either as part of a mashup or as a plugin to a platform as a service. Service oriented architecture is naturally more complex than traditional models of software deployment.

Cloud applications are generally priced on a per-user basis, sometimes with a relatively small minimum number of users and often with additional fees for extra bandwidth and storage. Cloud revenue streams to the vendor are therefore lower initially than traditional software license fees, but are also recurring, and therefore viewed as more predictable, much like maintenance fees for licensed software.

In addition to the characteristics mentioned above, Cloud software turns the tragedy of the commons on its head and frequently has these additional benefits:

• More feature requests from users since there is frequently no marginal cost for requesting new features;
• Faster releases of new features since the entire community of users benefits from new functionality; and
• The embodiment of recognized best practices since the community of users drives the software publisher to support the best practice.

History

The concept of "software as a service" started to circulate prior to 1999 and was considered to be "gaining acceptance in the marketplace" in Bennett et al., 1999 paper on "Service Based Software".

Whilst the term "software as a service" was in common use, the CamelCase acronym "SaaS" was allegedly not coined until several years later in a white paper called "Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service" by the Software & Information Industry's eBusiness Division published in Feb. 2001, but written in fall of 2000 according to internal Association records.

Philosophy

As a term, SaaS is generally associated with business software and is typically thought of as a low-cost way for businesses to obtain the same benefits of commercially licensed, internally operated software without the associated complexity and high initial cost. Many types of software are well suited to the SaaS model, where customers may have little interest or capability in software deployment, but do have substantial computing needs. Application areas such as Customer relationship management (CRM), video conferencing, human resources, IT service management, accounting, IT security, web analytics, web content management and e-mail are some of the initial markets showing SaaS success. The distinction between SaaS and earlier applications delivered over the Internet is that SaaS solutions were developed specifically to leverage web technologies such as the browser, thereby making them web-native. The data design and architecture of SaaS applications are specifically built with a 'multi-tenant' backend, thus enabling multiple customers or users to access a shared data model. This further differentiates SaaS from client/server or 'ASP' (Application Service Provider) solutions in that SaaS providers are leveraging enormous economies of scale in the deployment, management, support and through the Software Development Lifecycle.