Select Seamless Integration Capabilities for First-rate Service Delivery

Welcome back to the series – 10 Must Ask Questions When Buying (or re-signing) a Service Management Solution. If you missed previous posts, catch up with the links below.

Question #7: Can it integrate with my other software and cloud solutions?

We live in a connected world. Our lives are increasingly managed through our smartphones. We message, call, order, watch, and pay—all through the convenience of our handy mobile devices. Most applications we use are interconnected, sharing data, functions, and features. We take it all for granted because this is the level of consumerization that we have come to expect in our everyday lives.

Businesses are interconnected too and no company today stands alone. Enterprises rely on technologies that share functions and data to provide employees with the tools they need to get the job done efficiently and easily. As more technology is purchased “as a service,” that interconnection becomes more complicated, with data moving in and out of secured infrastructures. Integrating these services, managing both internal and external service providers, and ensuring everything works together seamlessly, is a complex but necessary undertaking.

Integration of services is an imperative for doing business

Service integration is no longer an option within modern technical solutions. It is an imperative. As your IT organization is tasked with managing more services—and less technology infrastructure—service integration is inescapable. Creating a seamless integration is the only way to keep your systems humming, and your workforce satisfied and productive.

To create an integrated IT service, connecting the user interface with data, applications, and security requires a service management solution built from the ground up to do this. And it must be done in such a way that’s both intuitive for the beginner, yet advanced enough to allow for deep dives into service nuances and complexities—without sacrificing one for the other.

Standard API integrations are essential for speed and sustainability

Your service management solution must go beyond the ability to create the service in an intuitive manner; there must be industry recognized and standard APIs integrated into the solution. This allows new applications and “as a service” services to be quickly integrated, or eliminated, within any services created by your company. Solutions must manage the overall process, provide the availability of pre-defined workflows, and design service templates to assist in developing and testing new services prior to deployment.

The majority of service management providers today focus a great deal of product development resources on automation among software and systems, ultimately driving up the cost of the solution. Investigating how those solutions integrate today and in the future is always based upon APIs they support, which industry standards are inherent within the solution and their overall design philosophy.

Knowing how data and functions are leveraged outside the platform to create a seamless service (the service delivered and managed by your IT organization) and how your service management solution integrates with those pieces will provide key purchasing information.

Seamless integration

EasyVista has taken a slightly different path than a typical ITSM solution, developing a purpose-built mobile-first platform with the capability to integrate with any application using industry standard APIs, including:

• Web services (SOAP and REST)
• E-mail exchanges (IMAP4/POP3/SMTP)
• File exchanges
• Data sources (ODBC)
• Scripts (API)
• XML

This flexibility allows each integration to be unique to a given enterprise, while providing flexibility in regards to new functionality, integration methods, and data sharing. This also avoids the creation of unnecessary re-work when applications are upgraded—either the underlying services management platform or the functional application.

Learn More

Catch up on this full series: 10 Must Ask Questions When Buying (or re-signing) a Service Management Solution

Post 1 – Overview
Post 2 – Closing the Gap Between User Expectations and IT Service Realities
Post 3 – The Emerging Mobility Challenge: Supporting User Productivity in a BYOD World
Post 4 – Services Must be Easy to Deliver to Achieve Service Management Success
Post 5 – Delivering Rapid Business Value with Easy Codeless Service Design
Post 6 – Driving Business Innovation with Service Management
Post 7 – Why Mobile-first Matters in a Service Management Solution
Post 8 – Select Seamless Integration Capabilities for First-rate Service Delivery
Post 9 – How to Calculate Total Cost of Service Delivery of an ITSM Solution
Post 10 – 5 Things That Prove a Service Management Vendor is Invested in Your Success 
Post 11 – Best Practices for Forming a Successful Partnership with a Service Management Vendor