HP Service Anywhere Takes the IT Help Desk to the Cloud

HP has launched a new product aimed at moving the enterprise help desk into the cloud. Called HP Service Anywhere, the new software as a service (SaaS) offering adds features not available in HP’s traditional IT service management (ITMS) software.

According to Craig Galbraith with Channel Partners, “HP says Service Anywhere provides comprehensive service desk capabilities, including the handling of inbound requests and IT service configuration information as well as incident, problem and change management. The solution features social collaboration for sharing and recording advice and communications. Social collaboration can improve first call resolution (FCR) rates, shorten handling times and reduce escalations by immediately alerting and engaging the right people to resolve issues.”

eChannelLine’s Mark Cox quoted HP’s Manoj Raisinghani, who said, “We are bringing a new product to market, a SaaS product that is very modern, very easy to use.” Raisinghani added, “We already have an on-premise service management product — Service Manager — which is one of top leaders in the space. If you bought an on-premise license, we could offer it as a managed SaaS service, so we did have a managed service offering. But this one is a completely new architected environment.”

Computerworld’s Joab Jackson observed, “HP is marketing this service to organizations that have 25 to 500 user desk users. Pricing for HP Service Anywhere starts at $89 per user per month.”

Alex Barrett from TechTarget noted, “According to a report by IDC, the cloud software market was $22.9 billion in 2011 and will grow to $67.3 billion by 2016, at a compound annual growth rate of 24%. SaaS-based systems management software is growing at only a slightly slower rate – 19.6%, headlined by service desk, performance management and configuration and automation.”