It cannot be emphasised enough that a service desk platform is essential for IT support and service. Your IT team needs to deliver predictable and planned operations to maximise system availability, which in turn optimises the rest of the business in the work it does.

Yet, many companies are relying on improvised tools - chat messages, spreadsheets, and task lists. Or they have highly convoluted service desks - a Frankenstein's monster of pieces that hinders recording and leveraging historical knowledge. Or, they have a solution that costs so much they end up limiting the number of agents or devices, and thus never extracting maximum value from it.

iTWire looked at SolarWinds ITSM previously, and two and a half years later, not only does it still deliver a best-in-class platform, but it has evolved further. The result is a modern product to ensure companies can improve their service delivery, reduce downtime, optimise infrastructure, manage and prioritise projects, allocate resources efficiently, monitor and manage systems in real-time, and provide insights to identify areas of improvement and potential issues before they become critical.

During our last exploration, iTWire said SolarWinds has brought its expertise and skill to deliver a SaaS-based service management platform, which we summarised by saying the Service Desk is complete with a configurable self-service portal, ITIL offerings ranging from incident management, problem management, and change management, along with a service catalogue, and integrated asset management.

The world has moved significantly since that time, with many businesses needing to adjust their ways of working. The pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and staffing challenges created a confluence of pressures that made it imperative for organisations to adjust and innovate while proactively, efficiently, and cost-effectively managing their IT service delivery.

In short, it's those companies that manage their IT service management effectively that are best placed to weather disruption and come out ahead. That's where ITIL comes in, the IT Infrastructure Library, a set of guidelines and a framework for IT efficacy and efficiency. In fact, ITIL has its origins way back in 1972 from work by IBM and is well-proven. And thus, a platform that enables your business to implement and manage this framework and processes is a key ingredient to your success. And, in particular, a platform that does so with rich functionality, with numerous embedded quality-of-life features for ease of use and integration, that provides insights for analysis and continual improvement, and which does so without breaking the back.

And that platform is SolarWinds ITSM. It's also scalable from single-person IT teams to vast, multinational enterprises making it the only service desk solution you'll need whether you're a start-up or an established business. It will scale with your business as it grows, but more than this it enables that growth by keeping your IT support and projects reliable, planned, optimised, managed, and proactive.

Like the world, much has changed with SolarWinds ITSM these last years too. Some of the notable enhancements iTWire has seen and appreciated include:

• Microsoft Teams integration. Your end-users can submit a ticket through Microsoft Teams (thank goodness, instead of them sending you a chat message only), and they can view a list of tickets they have created and can perform these actions via the Microsoft Teams mobile app too. This makes life easier for your users, who can work via their existing tools and collaboration methods, while still ensuring they do so in a way that works best for the IT department.

• Dynamic forms for incidents, allowing you to customise the fields or forms presented based on user selections. There's no need to create different forms for each module or category or subcategory; you can have one versatile form that suits many different scenarios.

• Time-based notifications, among other things, allow you to be notified when an asset hasn't reported back in a specified amount of time. You can also set this to create a ticket, so your team knows to go and investigate why.

• Microsoft Intune integration, providing the services and tools to manage and monitor assets such as desktops, servers, and mobile devices, linking them to related tickets for better management.

• Automation rules extended to assets. Now you can, for example, receive a notification when an asset changes hands, as well as update records and create tickets all via automation.

• Advanced service statistics reports that track the actual time incidents spend in different states or are assigned to each agent. These are brilliant for getting visibility into the flow of your service desk and identifying where bottlenecks may exist.

• Comment integration from Jira, making it simple for your software developers and IT operations to work with each other on the same issues without having to exit their core tools or miss out on half of the conversation. This provides a complete and comprehensive picture of each incident in the organisation and strengthens collaboration.

There's a lot more iTWire can say, but the essence is SolarWinds ITSM was an outstanding fully-featured IT service management platform when we last wrote about it back in late 2020, and it has continued to bring more and more capability and utility at a tremendous pace.

Also, SolarWinds has now announced the launch of its first ITSM data centre in Australia, based in Sydney. This is good news for all in the region, improving performance and speed while ensuring data sovereignty needs are served.

The data centre will serve Australia, of course, as well as other businesses through the Asia Pacific region, with lower latency and accelerated responsiveness. The move continues to demonstrate SolarWinds' commitment to its longevity and growth in this area and market.

So, whether you currently have a service desk product or not, you need to check out SolarWinds ITSM. There's a free trial available so you can test it out on a VM. You won't look back.