Ryan Ogilvie is an expert in the IT service management space. Ryan has been working in the industry since 2006 and has been recognised by HDI as a top 25 thought leader. With a passion for sharing knowledge, he aims to help businesses leverage service management best practices.
The opportunity arose for Ryan to independently review HaloITSM and knowing his expertise, we were excited to see his thoughts. Now available, we have published Ryan’s review below:
Company Overview – HaloITSM
Looking for a way to enable your teams to deliver an excellent service experience, then look no further. HaloITSM allows you to do just that by providing a platform that is easy to use, configure and scale at the pace your business needs.
HaloITSM, which changed its name in 2020 from NetHelpDesk, was founded in 1994. Since that time they have established their headquarters in Stowmarket UK, with global offices in San Diego USA and Melbourne Australia supporting companies of all sizes in all types of industries. With customers in over 40 countries, HaloITSM is truly a global service provider.
Solution Overview
HaloITSM has 3 product offerings: ITSM, Service desk and PSA. PSA (Professional Services Automation) focuses primarily on activities that relate to CSM, procurement, sales and billing. The Service Desk product is a simpler ticket tracking system which out of the box is not aligned with any ITIL practices. It is aimed at internal service delivery teams (areas outside of IT like finance, legal, HR, facilities) or external facing customer service teams.
The focus of this review is on the HaloITSM platform which comes out of the box with many of the key modules that will get you and your support teams to the next level of service delivery. The easily configurable self-service portal provides the focal point in which your user base can collaborate with your support teams. To round out your overall service management improvements you also have access to powerful modules such as knowledge, problem and configuration management out of the box.
One of the features I found interesting was how suggested items are available as I fill out a form. An example of this was as I was filling out an incident form articles from the knowledge base were available to help me solve my own problem. This ability to further facilitate self-service provides a measurable savings in time from your front-line staff but also improves the user experience. What makes this more well thought out is the ability for this action to be tracked to outline the number of time that a knowledge record helps to avoid an escalation to support teams.
While asset discovery is an additional cost, you have access to use the asset management capability of the system to track and visualize any dependencies right from the initial deployment. The benefit here is that you can relate incidents, problems and changes to assets which are experiencing issues enabling better information to those looking at trend analysis.
Reporting
With hundreds of reports out of the box, you can focus your attention to using the available information to make informed decisions based on real-time data which is viewable on the dashboards.
Integrations
HaloITSM has several integrations in which you can leverage for your specific business needs. In addition to established Microsoft integrations you are able to leverage integrations with tools managing remote support, identity management, communication, accounting, event and asset management.
Implementations
Implementations are handled by HaloITSM and include your organizations system administrators along the way to ensure that they have first-hand knowledge of your implementation. This is also the opportunity for HaloITSM to train your administrators on the tool even though the codeless backend is easy to manage leveraging with drag and drop functionality. From HaloITSM’s perspective the implementation of the product is made even easier as their deployment teams work with your business to truly understand your business objectives and targets and that preparation is worth its weight in gold.
The platform itself is available as an on-premise instance as well as in the cloud and has major releases every three months with minor updates every 2 weeks.
Licensing
‘So, whats this going to cost me?’ you might hear. While I can’t speak to specifics here you can check the HaloITSM website for the latest pricing models. What I can share is that licensing in the HaloITSM platform is very flexible. Depending on your organizational needs you can leverage either named or concurrent licenses.
Named licensing is great if you have a fixed amount of support people who ae local to one office. For those who may have a more global footprint you might decide that the concurrent licensing model fits your organization better.
Solution Summary
Overall HaloITSM allows your organization to standardize your processes while providing insights into the analytics that drive continual improvement initiatives leveraging a feature-rich application. With flexibility and ease of use from both an administrative and end user perspective your organization is well positioned to provide an exceptional service experience.
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