Service-now.com Winter 2011 Release Launches the First-Ever Social Network Built for Enterprise IT

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Service-now.com today announced the immediate availability of its Winter 2011 release and the first-ever social network built for enterprise IT. This release will be used by customers to transform IT with new chat and Live applications built to support social IT. A new application for IT governance, risk and compliance (IT GRC) in addition to numerous updates to Service-now.com change and configuration management functionality are also included in the Winter 2011 release. Also today, Service-now.com announced its vision for IT 3.0.

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Information technology is built on the essentials of people, process and technology. IT 1.0 and IT 2.0 were focused on technology and process. IT 3.0 is an ongoing evolution for IT organizations as they take a people-centric view of IT service by using recent advances in technology and a more-practical approach to process. Now, IT can effectively bring together technology, process and people to deliver innovation required to truly transform IT. IT 3.0 represents the best of IT and focuses on helping the business through familiar usability, cloud services and social IT.

The Service-now.com Winter 2011 release builds on the leading SaaS for IT management platform to help make IT 3.0 a reality. Service-now.com is pervasive, familiar and simply powerful. It was born in the cloud and just works. It is now the first social network built for enterprise IT.

Based on feedback from Service-now.com IT customers looking to tap into the power of social, Service-now.com has added chat functionality and Live for enterprise IT collaboration and to simplify communication between IT people, IT things and the rest of the business.

Paul Hardy, Informa head of service and support, said, "Our business units are already eager to have their services and processes automated by the Service-now.com platform. Now with the recent introduction of social IT included in the Service-now.com Winter 2011 release, we are actively looking to deploy Service-now.com Live as our enterprise social collaboration tool. Service-now.com Live appeals because it provides our business with ownership and control of process, users and content with little, if any, additional cost to IT."

Service-now.com Chat

Service-now.com Chat is SaaS and allows end users to more easily communicate with IT or any business service provider. Groups and organizations can also create chat rooms. These conversations are automatically captured and preserved within appropriate records, such as records for incident, problem or change.

Chat can be easily extended to any Service-now.com business or IT application and used for everything from emergency change advisory board meetings, to project management, to HR and facilities services. IT service desk professionals can increase scalability by using chat queues and can launch a chat from an incident (or any task record) or create a record from an existing chat.

Service-now.com Live

Service-now.com Live takes inspiration from Facebook and Twitter but was built to help IT deliver better service. Live provides "wall" functionality and allows people and things (like events, business services and configuration items) to collaborate, connect and ultimately help each other as a people-powered extension of IT support.

The stream of actionable information in Live forms a living and breathing knowledge source that moves at the speed of its users. This knowledge collective can be shared, searched, tagged, grouped, subscribed, liked and linked as individual users curate and personalize data to their benefit. Service-now.com Live also creates an invaluable source of data allowing IT to track, analyze and act upon trending issues and topics in the first-ever IT zeitgeist.

Similar to Service-now.com Chat, Live can be used to promote collaboration for IT projects, software development, change management and anything that requires group input. With Live, IT gets social, and more relevant than ever.

Fred Luddy, Service-now.com CEO, said, "The Service-now.com Winter 2011 release is helping transform IT and draws a line in the sand for the emergence of IT 3.0. A few years ago we turned the industry on its head with the first IT management service in the cloud. Now we are doing it again with social IT."

Industry observers also see the trend toward social IT. According to Gartner research, "Today's IT service management (ITSM) tools provide little support for ad hoc interactions and other forms of collaboration among IT operations personnel. Typically, only well-documented processes can be transformed into structured ITSM flows, leaving a substantial number of IT tasks with little opportunity for conversion into reusable assets. This is exacerbated by the fact that much of the dialogue between IT staff in these and other areas occurs "out of band" of the management systems — i.e., via e-mail, instant messaging, tweeting, IP phones, etc." (Gartner, Inc., "Collaborative Operation Management: A Next-Generation Management Capability," Cameron Haight, Jan. 21, 2011.)

And from Forrester Research, "When encountering performance or quality issues, users will select the most convenient port of call to register their complaints or service requests. Both business application software help desks and enterprise IT support desks can no longer assume that they will automatically be contacts. They must effectively compete for attention against all of the user's alternative communication routes. Success will depend on the quality of the service experience as perceived by the users and on the effectiveness of listening for, and responding to, relevant service dialogue happening across the social media ether." (Forrester Research, Inc., "Empowered Users will Change How Business Software is Served," Peter O'Neill, Oct. 26, 2010.)

Service-now.com IT GRC

The Service-now.com Winter 2011 release also includes a new IT governance, risk and compliance (IT GRC) application as a powerful alternative to the expensive and disconnected IT GRC software offerings available today. Service-now.com IT GRC is built on the Service-now.com platform allowing it native access to existing IT data and processes. Service-now.com IT GRC helps IT organizations proactively measure and manage technology and process controls for standards, frameworks, or regulations like FedRAMP, COBIT, SOX, ISO27001 and ITIL.

The Winter 2011 release also includes a number of significantly updated features to Service-now.com change and configuration management capabilities. These updates include change collision detection, enhanced software license management, and asset data field normalization to transform raw, often inconsistent data into formats people can use and understand.

Additional Service-now.com Winter 2011 updates include:

• Project management skills assignment;
• IT cost allocation across projects and operational tasks;
• A new Service-now.com Runbook Automation process pack for PowerShell;
• High availability and high capacity for discovery, runbook automation and integrations;
• An ODBC driver for more third-party reporting and business intelligence.

Here is what Service-now.com partners are saying about the Winter 2011 release:

Tom Michel, Fruition Partners chief sales officer, said, "With social IT included in the Service-now.com Winter 2011 release we've taken collaboration to the next level by promoting conversations into knowledge articles.  Rather than using separate tools, we now have a single place for people to ask questions, collaborate and share files without losing the shared knowledge."

Ryan Sneed, Maryville Technologies client services director, said, "Service-now.com has once again provided timely enhancements in its Winter 2011 release. We continue to be impressed by the ability of Service-now.com to truly listen to clients and deliver timely IT service management enhancements.

"Our service management clients routinely request help with change and configuration management compliance. Service-now.com delivers IT governance, risk and compliance automation to help our customers manage their policies, risks and controls and provides the much-needed evidence and exception trail often required by auditors. By linking ITSM technology and process with the Service-now.com IT GRC engine, our clients can easily self assess their regulation compliance."

Licensing and availability

Service-now.com offers a simple yet flexible subscription model with volume discounts available. The new applications delivered in the Winter 2011 release are provided to Service-now.com customers as part of their existing subscription license.

Service-now.com has delivered three major releases per year for more than five years to provide customers with the most innovative IT management technology. Thousands of Service-now.com customer instances were seamlessly updated with the Winter 2011 release on Feb. 4, 2011. Through the release update, customer customizations and configurations were preserved and service availability remained uninterrupted.

Experience IT 3.0 and compare the difference between SaaS for IT from Service-now.com and legacy tools like BMC Remedy and HP Service Manager. A Winter 2011 release demonstration video is now available, or an open, no-registration-required instance of Service-now.com is always available at http://demo.service-now.com.

To learn even more about Service-now.com, join us in San Diego for Knowledge11. The annual Service-now.com user conference will be held at the Paradise Point Resort and Spa from May 15 – 19, 2011.

About Service-now.com

Pervasive and familiar technology, evolved processes, cloud services and social IT are combining to help IT focus on the business and its people. Service-now.com is built to help customers transform IT and realize the benefits of IT 3.0. Service-now.com SaaS for enterprise IT management is best known for being software that just works. Founded in 2004, Service-now.com is using a new business model and modern technology to become the largest and fastest-growing IT management software company on the 2010 Inc. 500 list. For more information, please visit http://www.service-now.com/ or http://blog.service-now.com.

SOURCE Service-now.com