Advancements within ITSM in 2023

Introduction

The OnPage team is thrilled to inform that we’ve been included in Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for ITSM, 2023 report, listing OnPage as a Sample Vendor in the Automated Incident Response category.

In this blog, we draw upon our analysis of the Hype Cycle report and our individual insights into the IT Service Management (ITSM) market trends to uncover key patterns, while also recommending readers to consult the original Gartner report for a comprehensive understanding of the subject.

Within this blog, we also discuss OnPage’s view on how incident alerting solutions seamlessly align with IT Service Management (ITSM), bolstering incident management and streamlining processes. At OnPage, we predict that our solution is poised for growth and positioned for continued success and widespread adoption.

OnPage’s View on Key Technologies from this Year’s Hype Cycle Report

As an industry leader in incident alert management for ITSM solutions, we firmly believe that the ITSM landscape has undergone significant changes in the past year. For starters, we believe that Generative AI has gained considerable popularity, capturing the interest of IT leaders seeking to enhance their ITSM processes’ efficiency.

OnPage agrees with the insights reported by Gartner:

“More technology products and services will incorporate generative AI capabilities in the next 12 months, introducing conversational ways of creating and communicating with technologies, leading to their democratization.”

Based on our understanding of the market, we believe that some popular ITSM platform vendors have already begun exploring use cases to leverage Generative AI in their offerings. For instance, ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent leverages generative AI to provide automated responses and solutions to common IT issues. Freshwork’s AI-powered Freddy assists in service request automation. It uses generative AI to understand user requests, automate routine tasks and deliver self-service options.

While OnPage believes that Generative AI holds immense potential to improve response times and automate repetitive tasks that would otherwise take up the bulk of the IT technician’s time, we also recognize that the technology is still in its nascency, precluding its usage for mission-critical operations.

This leads us to the next transformational technology that has achieved significant market penetration – Service Operations.

According to Gartner,

“Service Operations is the convergence of the infrastructure and application monitoring environments with the ITSM incident management practice to create a more effective and optimized mechanism for diagnosing and resolving incidents.”

At OnPage, we’ve taken a leading role in facilitating accelerated service delivery that forms the basis of incident resolution. Our solution is extensively embraced by service delivery leaders spanning various industries, effectively expediting incident resolution and enhancing the work environment for on-call support analysts. This firsthand experience has endowed us with a deep understanding of the prevalent challenges within the service delivery sector.

OnPage is particularly aware of the challenges stemming from siloed incident management practices. These issues create disjointed experiences across ITSM platforms and monitoring solutions, ultimately having a significant impact on the efficiency of incident resolution processes. To address this, OnPage proposes a solution for service delivery leaders: integrate platforms in a manner that eliminates the need for context switching and enhances access to contextual information all in one place.

When OnPage’s IT service alerting (ITSA) tool is integrated with ITSM and monitoring platforms, it streamlines the end-to-end management of critical alerts. Through a seamless bidirectional integration between OnPage and widely used ITSM software, crucial alerts are not only relayed but also resolved within the mobile app. This integration ensures that incident actions are automatically synchronized with the ITSM system, leading to a more efficient and effective incident management workflow.

Now, switching gears and moving on to the next emerging practice, we delve into our perspectives on Swarming Support methodology within the context of ITSM.

Gartner defines swarming support as:

“Swarming support is a triage technique that bypasses hierarchical, traditional -tiered support structure by using collaboration capabilities to engage directly with individuals from different support teams to diagnose and resolve an incident.”

The tiered paradigm in IT support has long been prevalent and firmly ingrained in the landscape of incident management. Although systematic, tiered customer support often lacks the requisite sense of immediacy, often resulting in cases being “bounced” or “escalated” from one team to another team. It’s precisely for this reason that OnPage champions Swarming as a transformative technique for issue resolution. We think that this technique offers a framework centered around assembling interdisciplinary roles to address challenges. Within this context, support teams find value in deploying this technique to seamlessly engage cross-functional experts via collaborative platforms, effectively addressing critical incidents in a more agile manner.

Automated Incident Response

Gartner defines Automated Incident Response (AIR) as follows:

“AIR solution capabilities improve operational efficiencies with action-oriented insights, shorter incident durations and automated workflows for event routing, easier collaboration, remediation and escalations.”

Expanding on perspective from the Gartner report, OnPage considers Automated Incident Response (AIR) as a well-established and sophisticated mainstream technology. At its core, AIR serves as a central hub for incident routing and collaboration. Its pivotal role lies in automating incident communication, leading to decreased mean time to response and heightened operational efficiency. Notably, this year, OnPage has been mentioned as a Sample Vendor in this category in the Gartner Hype Cycle report.

As a leading AIR vendor, we believe that OnPage underscores the multifaceted benefits of this technology. These encompass rapid incident resolution, enhanced DevOps capabilities, valuable insights for process improvement, and automated workflows to reduce errors. Our clientele highlight capabilities such as on-call management, bi-directional integration with monitoring and service desk systems and improved incident communication through ChatOps tools. With confidence, at OnPage, we think that AIR has not only matured but gained significant traction within its market landscape.

Conclusion

As we reflect on our journey, we think that the inclusion of OnPage as a Sample Vendor in the Automated Incident Response category is a significant milestone for OnPage. We also think that this recognition is a testament to our unwavering commitment to driving the evolution of incident response automation and operational efficiency.

Our journey doesn’t stop here; instead, it propels us to continue pushing boundaries, seeking novel ways to elevate incident response practices. Our commitment to progress and excellence remains steadfast as we navigate the evolving landscape of ITSM, informed by the invaluable insights from Gartner and our customers.

* Hype Cycle Disclaimer
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and HYPE CYCLE is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.