We at ITinvolve got some great news this week — after launching our solution a little over a year ago, we have been named a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in IT Operations Management.

Obviously it’s great to be recognized by one of the leading technology analyst firms in the world, but it’s especially gratifying to be in the cool vendor category as an innovative, impactful and intriguing solution in the realm of IT management—an area that’s been sorely lacking in innovation for some time.

ITinvolve is the first and only IT management offering designed from the ground up to deliver a solution that captures and visualizes both human and machine knowledge and then enables your IT to collaborate in the context of specific issues or problems.

The result of using ITinvolve’s innovation solution is better decision-making across IT and reduced risk for the entire organization.  Visit our ITinvolve website to download the Cool Vendor Report and see why other analysts are rapidly recognizing our unique approach to collaborative knowledge for IT.   And, be sure to watch one of our recent archived webinars to hear straight from one of our customers, Jalasoft, how ITinvolve works in a highly complex environment.  When you’re ready, find out how you can take a no-risk free trial of ITinvolve for your own environment at http://www.itinvolve.com/try-it-now .

Matthew Selheimer,
Vice President Marketing

Last week Gartner released their “kinda annual” magic quadrant for the service desk market.  I say “kinda annual” as they skipped the prior year citing there was really nothing new to report. This year, the big news was that there still was nothing new to report. Gartner concluded there were literally no innovators and no leaders in their report. For those interested in the source document, it is titled “Magic Quadrant for IT Service  Support Management Tool” issued August 20, 2012 numbered G00231576.

I agree with Gartner’s conclusions that IT service desk tools themselves are no longer sufficient for maintaining business productivity. I believe the reason is service desk venders have not spent cycles on innovation due to the lack of perceived return on the innovation investment.

I’ll take social collaboration as one example of service desk venders asserting they have innovated where there really is none. Virtually all service desk tools claim they have social collaboration, but in reality their definition of social collaboration means opening a ticket via an IM session or chat rooms around a particular topic. That is not social collaboration. That’s a joke.

Collaboration innovation means:

• A subscribe/unsubscribe capability to allow you to follow the items you care about
• Automatic notification of only the items you care about
• A methodology where all stakeholders are looking at items in the same context
• Enabling virtual processes creation with common content and context
• A simple methodology to retain knowledge and associate it with a particular item in your IT environment such that the information is not lost in a knowledge base black hole

Social collaboration needs to be in the fabric of a service management solution, not an “add on” check box. At ITinvolve, we understand what it means to innovate. Check out our service management capabilities and see how we are innovating.

Logan Wray

CEO, ITinvolve

Breakthrough online management tool provides operational insight, visibility to manage key knowledge, changes in complex IT environment, dramatically improving service delivery

HOUSTON, July 2, 2012 – ITinvolve, the first cloud-based IT management solution for the social enterprise, today announced that PROS® (NYSE: PRO), a world leader in business-to-business pricing and revenue management software, has selected ITinvolve’s new IT management tools to help manage its SaaS-based cloud services. PROS chose both ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management™ and ITinvolve for Change Management™ to improve service delivery and help understand the impact of changes in its cloud environment.

Download the Press Release »

ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management has introduced a whole new realm of IT management that we call Social IT Operations.  What does that mean?  First it’s an acknowledgement that IT environments operate today in a social enterprise.  The “consumerization” of IT in many organizations reflects a change in not only in how people use technology in the workplace, but how they communicate with each other through social media.

Today, forward thinking IT professionals are looking for new solutions to help manage and transform their IT organizations in the social enterprise. Like you, they are looking for more effective ways to capture the power of collective information that is unstructured and scattered throughout the organization or resides in the minds of employees. If that information can be harnessed, your job—and the results you achieve—could be dramatically more effective in solving daily IT challenges.

Check out our Free White Paper entitled “Social IT Operations Management: A new approach for solving persistent IT problems,” to learn more about how new ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management can make your life a lot easier and your IT team much more efficient and productive.  And see for yourself how ITinvolve can work for you by signing up for a webinar

There’s something going on in IT operations these days.  People are starting to admit that CMDBs aren’t working anymore.  Most IT professionals already know this, but it’s difficult to acknowledge after investing so much time, effort and money into systems that have rarely delivered on their promise.

That’s why ITinvolve’s introduction of Social Knowledge Management, the new cloud service based on the Force platform from salesforce.com is so important. Because for the first time, ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management delivers what can only be a called “a single version of the truth.”  It’s a new solution that’s easily accessible online from anywhere and federates all kinds of structured and unstructured information in ways that IT professionals can actually use to solve problems, make changes and demonstrate compliance.

The concept is simple and the execution is straightforward: organize IT environments according to objects that represent not just physical elements such as servers but other technology and knowledge such as applications, policies and people.  ITinvolve’s approach is simple and direct using social collaboration that will improve communication among IT professionals. The best place to learn more is to start with the overview video about Social Knowledge Management.   Then sign up for a webinar

In a recent study conducted jointly by Forrester Research and ITSM found that of the ITSM professionals they survey only 25% have deployed CMDBs and are enjoying any form of success. When you speak to IT professionals the praises for their organization’s CMDB, or the slightly evolved CMS, are few and far between, and even when it is acknowledged as something positive, the positive comes with heavy caveats.

If you know that having a good understanding of the IT environment is absolutely necessary to manage the environment. And, you believe:

• Understanding the IT environment is not just about infrastructure and application connections. i.e. understanding those connections are necessary but not sufficient
• What is needed is a simple and effective tool to understand and visualize dependencies between people, infrastructure, policies, services and more

Then, you need to read our comparative report that helps you understand how ITinvolve has reinvented the obsolete  – but necessary CMDB.

Get it now at http://www.itinvolve.com/more/

Today, ITinvolve announced general availability of ITinvolve for Social Knowledge ManagementTM, empowering IT professionals with the ability to fully understand their complex IT environments, transparentlycollaborate to build collective knowledge, and effectively assess impacts and risks when making changes, resolving incidents and managing assets. ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management delivers on the original promise of today’s largely obsolete Configuration Database (CMDB) technologies.

Current tools for managing IT, including CMDBs, service desk tools and trouble ticket systems, lack the ability to provide a sufficient understanding of today’s complex IT infrastructure. As a result, IT professionals spend precious time trying to gain a complete picture of their rapidly evolving environment.

ITinvolve for Social Knowledge Management™ delivers a practical, comprehensive and up-to-date source of information that accurately captures and depicts any IT environment. For the first time, IT professionals gain access to a single source of federated knowledge enabling them to understand characteristics and relationships between physical and virtual devices, applications, policies, business services and people

Use it FREE

Over the past several years, the founders and developers of ITinvolve for Change Management have had a lot of conversations with system administrators, IT Directors and CIOs about their change management frustrations and needs.  We invariably heard the same story over and over again: Every time they experienced an outage, it was usually caused by changes made somewhere in their IT environment.  In short, they were doing it to themselves.

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