Another year – and what’s changed in the ITSM world? My 2017 round up centred on SaaS – how organisations had come to terms with their security concerns of the Cloud and started to embrace the combination of certainty and flexibility that comes with hosted pricing and devolved responsibility. At Sunrise in 2018, we’ve certainly seen that adoption trend continue – most of our new customers have taken the hosted ITSM option, and some long standing supporters of on-premise installation have converted to Sunrise’s SaaS offering as well. We fully expect that trend to continue.
So what’s been new in 2018? This year, industry talk has been rife on the subject of AI. Now, I love technology – the excitement of new devices and software that make daily life that much easier, or more fun, can be hard to resist. But AI? In IT Service Management, one of the most people-centric of IT disciplines? From some of the industry debate I see, you’d think we were all about to be replaced by robots. What I do see, every day, are the benefits of automation with our customers; automation is a real technology option with measurable benefits applicable in so many cases. However, when many companies we first meet are still struggling with defining and implementing even those fundamental workflow processes that will increase efficiency, cut costs and improve service levels, applying true Artificial Intelligence – of the scale and value that industry debate says will soon put humans out of jobs – seems somewhat premature. However, we do work closely with IBM, and their demos of ‘Watson’ technology never fail to impress, so it will be interesting to see how that develops in its application to our space from 2019 onwards.
What else did 2018 bring? Not new, but certainly as a growing trend, we’ve seen a number of customers appear out of the organisational woodwork and gain industry accolades that I’m pretty sure they’d have shied away from in the past. There’s a new breed of Service Director who is both unafraid of facing the music by meeting customers and proud to promote the IT support desk team – gone are the days of the ‘IT Crowd’ hiding in the basement, taking the phone off the hook! Informatics Merseyside recently achieved the much coveted and well-deserved distinction of 4 star SDI accreditation. It’s a proud moment for Sunrise to support forward-thinking customers and teams that add real value to their business, and we hope that there are many more such stories to come in 2019.
Wishing you all the very best for the festive season and New Year from all at Sunrise!