Asset and IT service management software house Staff&Line has released a new version of its flagship EasyVista suite, which now comes in two options of Classic for on-premise installation and EasyVista.com in SaaS (Software as a Service) mode.
The release comes with some major enhancements to the user interface, a redeveloped graphical configuration management database (CMDB) that allows for more granularity, and features that allow access to incident management tickets from mobile PDAs and smartphones.
EasyVista has been deployed by around 600 organisations worldwide, Gregory Lefort, VP for Business Development at Staff&Line told us, and is pitched in the market against products from the likes of BMC and HP, Axios and FrontRange.
The draw to the product is its ease of use and speed to deploy, and the tight coupling that can be achieved between IT asset and IT service management routines, using a single database, accessed through one interface and an integrated CMDB, he said.
The system has recently completed the PinkVERIFY certification of ITIL v3 compatibility for service management solutions the company has confirmed, with eleven processes verified as being ITIL compatible. “The system was built five years ago from the ground up to be wholly compatible with ITIL” said Lefort.
The company believes the SaaS option will appeal to two very different industry segments. Companies with mature and well-developed processes for asset and service management can see value in SaaS deployment. The other set includes organisations that may not yet have automated asset management but are now looking to optimise their asset base in a bid to cut costs in response to the economic climate, without having to make capital investments.
EasyVista.com has proved to be 50% cheaper than other alternatives based on 100 licences, the company claims.
New features included in EasyVista 2009 are new menus, extra productivity tools and redesigned screens that can be tagged and which show incident histories, action lists, and other favourite dashboard items.
The redeveloped CMDB allows unlimited numbers of configuration items to be shown on screen at any one time. The workflow options have been improved and the knowledge management features broadened so users can search internal sources or external vendor and service sites for help and guidance on service fixes.
The product has also been tuned so it can be used in support of an organisation’s Green IT initiative. This allows assets to be tracked to end of life to show compliance with recycling regulations such as the WEEE directive, and also provide an auditable process for monitoring IT asset energy utilisation and power usage.
