HPE SPM Portfolio Innovations: Service Manager 9.4, SmartAnalytics, and Propel

Classic and Innovation

For many Russian enterprises, a synonym for IT process automation is the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise system Service Manager. This ITSM solution has been leading the market for many years, setting a high bar for IT service management systems used in large companies. To understand its scope and power, it suffices to mention the installation of Service Manager in Russian Railways and Sberbank of Russia. HPE Service Manager has the official international certification of PinkVerify for compliance with 11 ITIL processes, and in addition, it is the only ITSM solution in our country with current FSTEC certification.


But the Service Manager developers are not going to rest on their laurels. Updated every six months, the system is constantly evolving, responding to technological trends and current customer needs, and at the same time largely defining market trends. A number of conceptual changes have been made to the newest version of HPE Service Manager 9.4.

First, HPE specialists worked hard to make it convenient and pleasant to work with Service Manager. Today, employees of companies, spoiled by modern mobile applications, expect that even the most complex system will be not only multi-functional, but also comfortable and easy to use - the concept of user experience gradually takes its place among the key characteristics of corporate solutions. Thanks to the significantly redesigned Service Manager 9.4 interface, technical support specialists and IT managers will find it easier to cope with their tasks: with registering and eliminating incidents, managing problems, collecting information for the knowledge base. Working with the system will give them pleasure.
HPE continues to develop the Service Manager mobile interface - a useful opportunity for technical support engineers who often work away from home, as well as for managers who can monitor the delivery of IT services from any location, even while on a business trip.

Significant changes have undergone the system configuration tools for the tasks of a specific client. Service Manager 9.4 offers a new tool for this - a graphical process designer. The task of process logic using graphical tools instead of time-consuming procedures that require knowledge of the subtleties of the implementation of the solution and programming skills, makes the implementation of ITSM-system much easier. Now it is enough for a specialist to understand how the IT-processes of the enterprise are arranged in order to launch their automation on the basis of Service Manager in a short period.
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Intellect for technical support

A truly revolutionary feature is provided to support services by the new HPE SmartAnalytics module, which can be used in conjunction with Service Manager. SmartAnalytics features are unique to ITSM tools - there is no analogue to this HPE design on the market yet.

The module introduces the ability to work with Big Data into IDR (incidental data processing from the HPE Portfolio) tools for semantic analysis of hits in the process of managing appeals, incidents and problems. As a result, the classification of incidents is carried out more quickly and accurately and, as a result, the efficiency and quality of their resolution is increased.

SmartAnalytics automatically fills contact support fields by analyzing the text in the application and comparing it with the data on already processed complaints and incidents. The user can describe his situation in an arbitrary form, and the system will understand how to classify an appeal, which of the hundreds of corporate IT services is affected by the incident, what priority this application will receive and which group of specialists to transfer the solution to the incident.

Moreover, a similar analysis can be applied not only to the text message about the incident, but even to the screenshot of the error message. It is enough for the user to take a screenshot of which a particular system signals an abnormal situation, and SmartAnalytics will analyze the message and draw conclusions about which system components have failed, determine the criticality level of the incident and indicate the support staff who are responsible for correcting mistakes. The appeal will be created automatically based on the information received.

Usually this kind of data is manually entered into the fields of appeal by the user or the operator of the support service. However, people are never immune from mistakes, which is fraught not only with wasting time searching for solutions to the incident, which are often false, and attracting specialists who do not have the necessary knowledge, but also ultimately violating service level agreements.

The artificial intelligence of SmartAnalytics is the exclusion of the human factor from the routine processes and the release of the intellectual resources of the support service for solving really complex tasks. Both are important elements for ensuring the quality of IT services.

In addition, thanks to the new module, the interaction of end users with customer support becomes much easier: an employee who is far from the knowledge of computer subtleties will be able to get a quick adequate response to any IT problem.

Using SmartAnalytics, work with the support service knowledge base becomes more substantive and intellectual. When the operator registers a call, the module's algorithms provide for searching and analyzing data from a federated database, in which ITSM-system's knowledge base articles and information from external sources (Wiki, Microsoft SharePoint) on previously used methods for processing such requests and closing similar incidents are combined at the index level rather than real integration. All this happens in real time, and the operator very quickly obtains comprehensive data for the most accurate classification of incidents and determining the best ways to eliminate them.

Finally, text requests accumulated over a certain period of time and data on related incidents and problems can be analyzed by SmartAnalytics to identify trends and build a “heat map” that clearly demonstrates the state of IT services in the company. This presentation provides the basis for a more in-depth analysis of incidents and problems, their causes and methods of resolution.
The SmartAnalytics module is completely Russified and implemented in such a way that even those technical support specialists who do not possess special analytical skills or knowledge of complex algorithms will be able to apply the solution. In this case, you can always take advantage of training from a wide range of programs that HPE offers in Moscow and other Russian cities, as well as in the CIS countries.

Single window service

HPE recently introduced another very interesting solution - the Propel system. On the one hand, it is an independent product, but at the same time it opens up additional opportunities for Service Manager users.

The purpose of Propel is to create a single point of access to a variety of corporate services based on different IT systems. One of the most painful problems faced by employees of any large company is the abundance of disparate solutions, each with its own interface and access rules. Such systems have to be accessed for various reasons - whether it is ordering a new printer, restoring a "fallen" operating system, requesting a document from the personnel department, and so on - and it is not always clear which one to enter in order to receive the desired service.

HPE Propel acts as an intermediary between the user and all the variety of enterprise IT functions available to him. The product aggregates service catalogs from various systems and provides access to any service through a single portal. Employees do not have to learn the interfaces of different systems and remember separate access identifiers for each. They know that they can take advantage of everything they need from anywhere via a mobile or web interface.

Propel is different from traditional portals that provide for the integration of different systems, when a request for certain information is made to move to a specific system. The HPE solution aggregates information about services from various enterprise applications using the data access orchestration mechanisms implemented in the HPE Operations Orchestration product. Thanks to its unique architecture, Propel not only makes life easier for users of IT services, but also frees IT professionals from the problems associated with integrating different solutions.

Currently, HPE Propel out of the box supports work with a wide range of systems, including HPE Service Manager ITSM platforms and BMC Remedy, HPE Cloud Service Automation, a solution for accessing cloud services, email, etc., and also provides a developer package ( SDK) to create connectors to any systems that may be needed by the client.

Aimed at development

Today, there are many different ITSM solutions available on the market - as they say, “for every taste and budget.” But HPE Service Manager remains a “classic of the genre.” This product attracts not only its reputation that has developed over the long years of leadership, but also constant updating and improvement, which are backed by HPE's powerful intellectual and financial resources. Service Manager is the right choice for visionary customers who understand the role of IT service management in the overall corporate IT architecture and see automation in the technical support service as the starting point for implementing an integrated approach to providing quality services.

HPE offers solutions for various aspects of IT services: monitoring and orchestrating processes in the data center, application lifecycle management, project office, configuration and capacity management in a hybrid environment, asset management, and more. Being closely associated with all these tools and supporting integration with similar systems from external suppliers, Service Manager can become the core of the IT department development, whatever the direction for this development.