At my wedding reception (I will NOT be saying how many years ago), another couple and my husband and I took the dance floor when the cotton eyed joe began to play.   I’ve actually seen it danced a few different ways but the way we danced it then involved a lot of going forwards and backwards, kicking and hopping to and fro in a circle as couples rather than traditional line dancing.  How did we manage this dance in a very small circle with all the dress clothes including my poofy wedding dress (THAT probably dated me) to boot and still manage to laugh our way through it?  Our partners made all the difference. 

You are probably thinking – she just released the ITSM Implementation Service Providers Wave for North America a few weeks ago with a blog, why didn’t she bring up the partnership story then?  Because picking the right partner for ITSM SaaS is just as important as picking an implementation service provider for success.  Everyone knows that when you pick a SaaS provider, they are responsible for the delivery operations of that service.  But I find clients who know very little about what the delivery capabilities are for the ITSM SaaS vendors and in the past we did not have a method of highlighting the differences between delivery capabilites.   In the newly released Forrester Wave: ITSM SaaS Delivery Capabilities report, I take the 10 vendors we have classified as having an “established” client base in the Market Overview: IT Service Management SaaS Tools Update, 2014 report and applied 30 evaluation criteria to detail these differences.

What did I find?  Caution is still needed in choosing the right ITSM SaaS partner.  First we recommend defining a subset of ITSM SaaS vendor tools that meet your requirements for features and functionality and then choosing between these vendors based on their delivery capabilities.  As with the features and functionality decision, every vendor may have unique tradeoffs in delivery capabilities that you need to decide between.  For example, of the three vendors who scored the highest in customer support capabilities, one offers benchmarking data, all offer different levels of operations performance reporting, and two don’t offer encryption beyond in-flight SSL. 

Choose the right ITSM SaaS vendor who offers what you need to have in features, functionality and delivery capabilities and hopefully has some added benefits you wanted.  Making the right tradeoffs will help you avoid any missteps in your ITSM journey.