Vantive Corp of Mountain View, California has brought its HelpDesk customer service software up to release 5.0, adding support for Austin, Texas-based BSG Corp’s change management technology; problem management software from Inference Corp, and ServiceWare Inc, and for IBM Corp and Tivoli Systems Inc network and systems management suites. A management information application for tracking staffing, product and service changes within support environments has been developed in conjunction with BSG’s Alliance/IT Inc unit. It includes change administration and scheduling tools and is integrated with the HelpDesk data model, workflow engine and user interface. HelpDesk 5.0’s Research Agent can now perform text searches against ServiceWare’s on-line Knowledge-Paks of problem resolution techniques. As well as support for IBM NetView 6000, Vantive is creating an interface to the Tivoli/Plus application programming interface which enables help desk, job scheduling, back-up and security tasks to be managed from the Tivoli Management Environment. HelpDesk 5.0 costs from $30,000 per Unix or NT application server supporting Motif, Windows and Mac clients, plus $2,500 per concurrent user. Vantive will also begin reselling Palo Alto-based Decisive Technology Corp’s Internet survey software.
