Applaud had been using Remedy for several to provide an outsourced IT management service when it decided to implement a cloud based offering. Founder and managing director, Ricci Danieletto, told iTWire: "We had fully embraced the Remedy technology and over the years gained a lot of experience delivering those services to customers. So two years ago when I decided to go into cloud services, I decided to make sure Remedy was part of that offering...It was a part of the market that was not really being addressed."

He claimed that the cloud based services - where Applaud configures Remedy to meet the client's needs and then hands it over to the customer's IT support staff to use - offered enterprises considerable advantages over a premises-based deployment.

"Remedy is a bit of a beast to implement. There are some fairly comprehensive consulting requirements. It is not a set and forget installation. We believe we have developed techniques to fast track that time to one to three months from six to nine months depending on the size of the organisation. Also, we are mitigating about 60 -70 percent of the up-front cost and converting that to opex."

Applaud has had the system in place for about 12 months and has had paying customers for about six. "I've been surprised at the amount of success," Danieletto said. "We've won some large and high calibre customers. One we are going live with this week is a professional services multinational with about three and half thousand seats. We have another customer with about 1100 seats that is big in human resources. We are now exploring extending the service into Hong Kong and beyond."

He added. "BMC are very excited about us offering this service and very much behind this because they see that we are addressing a position in the marketplace that they are not addressing - in their words it is not in their DNA...I met with one of their vice presidents about three months ago and he said: 'None of other partners are doing this'."

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Danieletto said that Applaud was using virtualisation to optimise its provision of Remedy from the cloud. "BMC have run Remedy in multi-tenanted instances in the past but I believe we have been a bit smarter. There are certain limitations around customisation in that method and we are really leveraging the power of virtualisation to give more flexibility...

"We have two instances one multi-tenanted for those that need basic requirements and for those that need unique requirement we run them up their own instance."

He said that BMC was facing increasing competition from cloud-based providers of ITSM. "They are the Gartner Magic Quadrant leader, but ServiceNow is gaining popularity and in the mid market starting to infringe on BMC, which is really focussed on the one to two thousand seat market."

"[Service Now] are very much the Salesforce.com of the IT service management industry," Danieletto said. "But we offer a much more bespoke service. We take customers through the implementation process, help them avoid the common mistakes and then hand them the keys."

Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools in August. BMC was rated the clear market leaders, but placed in the challengers' quadrant, followed by ServiceNow, which Gartner rated the fastest-growing company among the vendors evaluated for the Magic Quadrant.

No vendors made it into the leaders' or visionaries' quadrants and every other vendor was rated a niche player. Gartner evaluated only Remedy ITSM version 7.6.04. However BMC does have its own cloud offering, Remedy OnDemand, launched in 2010. Gartner ranked ServiceNow

In addition to its cloud based Remedy offering, branded the Applaud Service Management System as a Service (ASMS) Applaud offers Disaster Recovery on Demand in partnership with StorageCraft, an IaaS offering, Applaud Managed Server as a Service (AMSS) and Applaud Managed Desktop as a Service (AMDS).

The company employs 35 people and has just opened offices in Brisbane and Melbourne. It has also just expanded into providing telephony systems by becoming a reseller of ShoreTel equipment.

Danieletto said: "Convergence is a reality so if we are not talking voice to our customers we are not doing our job properly. I have been trying to pick the right PBX partner for about 18 months.

"Cisco and Mitel were trying to court me. ShoreTel weren't but I was reading some really good things about them so in July we decided to forma relationship with them and we signed on as a partner. We are replacing our existing Nortel/Avaya infrastructure in our operations with ShoreTel."

Applaud however has no concrete plans to offer telephony from the cloud. Danieletto said: "ShoreTel would like us to do that but it is not something we have explored at this stage...I believe there might be an opportunity for us."

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