Market Guide for IT Service Management Platforms

18 December 2023- ID G00801255- 34 min read

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ITSM platforms maintain a critical role in helping I&O leaders enable, automate, manage and deliver integrated IT services. Use this Market Guide to navigate the ITSM platforms market.

Overview

Key Findings

• Given the mature nature of the IT service management (ITSM) platform market, much of its core functionality is commoditized. This has made it difficult for I&O leaders to differentiate these products.

• While much early focus on AI/ML from ITSM platform vendors has been centered around integrated conversational AI, advances in ITSM platforms are embedding automation and AI in most ITSM processes.

• ITSM platform vendors make broad claims for supporting line-of-business needs outside of IT, yet depth of capabilities and subsequent adoption of these features varies widely.

Recommendations

• Select ITSM platforms by focusing on product functionality beyond linear workflow support, such as multichannel engagement, the insights provided to support decision making and service improvement, collaboration, integration, automation and reporting.

• Build an AI-centric ITSM practice roadmap to guide your platform by initially prioritizing virtual agent and AI augmentation of workflows with prescriptive insights, with long-term goals for cluster analysis, self-healing, generative knowledge creation and technology change automation. Ensure this is predicated on developing consistent ITSM processes that yield good data to train the models.

• Determine requirements and value for any use case outside of IT by engaging with line-of-business leaders to discuss current and future needs that go beyond simple workflows, such as engagement channels, analytics, integrations, data separation requirements and domain-specific functionality.

Market Definition

Gartner defines IT service management (ITSM) platforms as software that offers workflow management that enables organizations to design, automate, plan, manage, report on and deliver integrated IT services and related digital experiences. Supported practices include request, incident, problem, change, knowledge and configuration management, and case management, as well as interfaces for non-IT business needs. ITSM platforms are typically acquired as SaaS; however, they are also sold as on-premises deployments. I&O leaders select these solutions to be consumed by service desks and service operations, and are identifying opportunities for business workflows in other IT-adjacent departments.

IT leaders require robust ITSM platforms to drive business value in the services they provide, and are increasingly looking for these products to support digital business transformation outside IT. These platforms help I&O teams automate processes and design workflows, as well as support continual service improvement initiatives. As organizational needs evolve, they provide action-oriented insights that enable better decision making, orchestration and process automation choices, and multichannel support.

The must-have capabilities for this market include native workflows supporting the following ITSM practices:

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In addition, these platforms must provide a technology asset inventory database that links to the workflows.

Standard capabilities for this market include:

• Multichannel engagement of users — e.g., portal, mobile, virtual support agent, live chat, walk-up and collaborative support hub

• Service configuration management

• Service reporting and resource management

• Service catalog management

• Service level management

• Workflow, automation and integration among IT operations management (ITOM) tools, development tool chain and service providers

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• Integrated AI for automated and assisted insight

• Case management to facilitate simple ticketing and workflow requirements of business units adjacent to IT

• A graphical process designer to create and manage workflows

• Business value dashboards

• Digital employee experience (DEX) management functionality

• Native discovery and dependency mapping for configuration management

• Integrated IT operations observability and event management

Market Description

ITSM platforms support IT organizations in delivering digital services by offering a broad set of workflows, engagement channels, integration and supporting insights. Supporting this are these common capabilities for ITSM platforms:

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The core functional areas above are largely commoditized in this market and generally represent the minimum viable capabilities to sustain an ITSM practice or line-of-business platform extension. Specialized features are less common across the market. Many of these extend workflows, enabling I&O leaders to scale their practices through deeper collaboration and automation. Differentiated functional areas typically support advanced needs and often align with a vendor’s unique positioning. Further details on each functional area can be found in Determine Key Functional Areas for Your IT Service Management Platforms.

Market Direction

The ITSM platforms market is functionally mature, but these products remain a staple for most I&O teams. Despite the maturity of the ITSM platforms market exhibiting low competition and limited innovation, there are still further opportunities for development in areas such as machine learning, collaborative and federated support, generative AI, and automation.

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• IT operations management (ITOM) consolidation: I&O leaders seeking to accelerate the way they monitor, detect, and resolve incidents must create a connected ITOM tooling strategy. (See Innovation Insight: Create a Service Response Capability to Reduce the Volume and Impact of Incidentsfor further details.) To address this buyer need, ITSM platform vendors are already investing in observability and monitoring (e.g., log monitoring, employee experience), event correlation, and automation (e.g., SaaS management, self-healing) offerings as part of a larger platform or portfolio strategy.

• Lightweight ITSM: I&O leaders who are driven by agile and DevOps alignment often shy away from heavy investments in traditional ITSM tooling. Alternatively, they will build a minimalistic approach to ITSM, in which they deploy a toolchain-like solution with a low-cost ITSM product to act as a hub for select workflows (e.g., changes, problems), surrounded by point solutions to fill needs in areas such as incident management and AI. While many ITSM platforms can fit into that “good enough” strategy, this also presents opportunity for disruption by adjacent markets, such as automated incident response, conversational AI, and observability products, as they invest in workflow features.

Market Analysis

The vendor landscape for ITSM platforms market is stable. While there has been some consolidation over the past several years, more recent market acquisitions within the ITSM platforms space have focused on adding integrated functionality such as AI, monitoring and observability. There is a dominance at the top end of the market, where the leading three vendors have an estimated 67% of the overall market share and the top vendor by revenue has around 42% of the market share.^1,2

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While most organizations already have an ITSM platform, this market continues to see growth through broader extensions into lines of business outside of IT. This is accomplished through the sale of extended functionality such as AI and orchestration features, and through parallel buying in other functional areas. Gartner continues to observe buyer demand for functionality that extends the scope of ITSM tools beyond traditional IT service management practice support. The following two sections discuss this in more detail.

Extending the ITSM Platform Into Adjacent Lines of Business

All vendors surveyed for this Market Guide noted that they provide out-of-the-box workflows outside of IT to support a number of different business requirements. In addition, many provide low-code and no-code workflow design capabilities, which enable citizen developers to build process-centric applications with minimal involvement from IT or non-IT development staff. Most commonly supported were the extension into service delivery for HR and facilities (100%), followed by support for some project and contract management features (83%).

It is critical to note, however, that just because a vendor claims to support a business use case does not mean they provide deep support for that line-of-business requirement. In many cases, Gartner customer feedback indicates functional support outside of IT for the business extensions in many ITSM platforms is limited to a subset of form templates, workflows and reports that adapt service management practices to that need. Customers looking for a deeper set of out-of-the-box (OOTB) capabilities or a best-of-breed solution, such as a full human capital management (HCM) or an adaptive project management and reporting solution, should consider vendors that are more experienced in that domain. Adoption for non-IT requirements among the ITSM platforms that offer those OOTB extensions also widely varies among vendors, yet remains limited. Vendors typically report that less than 50% of their customers use their product in the individual use cases outside of IT. I&O leaders looking to develop a strategic approach to enterprise service management should review 3 Keys to Enterprise Service Management Success.

The Growing Role of AI in ITSM Platforms

While not exclusive to any subset of the market, Gartner continues to see broad investments into AI and machine learning from ITSM platform vendors. I&O organizations are looking to leverage AI to drive more speed and scale for their services (see Use-Case Prism: Artificial Intelligence for IT Service Desk), and platform vendors are looking to this as an opportunity to upsell and differentiate. Most vendors in our analysis are leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to provide a native virtual agent. This is also the most commonly requested application of AI from the I&O leaders we engage with in inquiry. This is followed by intelligent triage capabilities that leverage machine learning and NLP to remove manual steps in a workflow, such as categorization and prioritization of a ticket and case clustering to identify commonalities within tickets.

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Given the growing need of I&O groups to optimize IT support and service management processes, in 2023 Gartner introduced the new Market Guide for Artificial Intelligence Applications in IT Service Management. This research focuses on the tools, including both stand-alone products and a subset of ITSM platforms, for analyzing ITSM information and metadata to provide intelligent advice and actions on ITSM practices and workflows.

Representative Vendors

The vendors listed in this Market Guide do not imply an exhaustive list. This section is intended to provide more understanding of the market and its offerings.

Vendor Selection

There are hundreds of ITSM vendors in the market. This research identifies a range of representative vendors that have met Gartner’s market definition for an ITSM platform and provide native workflow support for the following practices:

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A vendor’s exclusion from this research does not mean that it and its products lack viability. Gartner regularly advises clients to explore the broader market to select a fit-for-purpose solution (see Table 1).

Representative Vendors of ITSM Platforms (alphabetically listed)

Source: Gartner (December 2023)

Vendor Profiles

4me

4me, founded in 2010, is a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S. Its operations are in North America and Europe, and it targets managed service providers and organizations with more than 500 employees. 4me’s strategy is aimed at delivering a feature-rich, service-centric ITSM platform, which can be extended across the enterprise to address enterprise service management (ESM) and service integration and management (SIAM) use cases. Due to 4me’s multitenant cloud architecture, deployments can connect with other 4me deployments (whether internal departments or third-party providers) without custom integration work. It also provides additional support for managed service provider (MSP) customers, with features including service charging and time tracking.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Technology and telecom

Atlassian

Atlassian, founded in 2002, is a public company headquartered in Sydney, Australia. Its operations are global, and it targets organizations of all sizes with its ITSM offering. Atlassian’s strategy aims to provide a single platform that connects development, I&O and business teams across the entire life cycle of digital products and services — from initial concept to build, ship, operate and support. It provides a connected ecosystem of solutions across the broader Atlassian platform, including Jira Software, Jira Product Discovery, Jira Work Management, Compass and Confluence (bundled as the knowledge management solution within Jira Service Management).

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Top industry presence (by customers): Technology and telecom providers

BMC

BMC, founded in 1980, is a privately held company headquartered in Houston, Texas, U.S. Its operations are global, and it targets midsize and larger customers with its ITSM offering. BMC’s strategy is aimed at unifying operations and service management to better support DevOps teams and connect the lines of business. It supports the needs of highly mature I&O organizations with its ITSM process support, BMC Helix Operations Management integration for monitoring and observability, robust configuration management, and AI-driven features such as case clustering.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Government, technology and telecommunications, and financial services.

EasyVista

EasyVista, founded in 1988, is a privately held company headquartered in Paris, France. Its operations are in North America and Europe and it targets midsize and larger customers with its ITSM offering. EasyVista’s strategy is aimed at making it simple to set up and obtain value quickly in IT service support and delivery to improve IT maturity with AI-enabled ITSM and integrated IT operations management products. Acquisitions provide it with native operations products that complement the ITSM platform with digital experience, infrastructure monitoring and endpoint management support. EasyVista provides its customers with a Green IT dashboard for tracking the environmental impact of devices.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Government, manufacturing

Espiral MS Group

Espiral MS Group, founded in 1998, is a privately held company headquartered in Gijón, Asturias, Spain. Its operations are mostly in Spain as well as Latin America, and it targets medium-to-large enterprises with its ITSM offering. Espiral MS Group’s strategy is aimed at providing an easy-to-implement ITSM and IT asset management (ITAM) tool for improving management practices with a fast return on investment. It focuses primarily on ITSM and ITAM, and maintains several third-party certifications for its product.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Government, financial services

Freshworks

Freshworks, founded in 2010, is a public company headquartered in San Mateo, California, U.S. Its operations are global and it targets small to midsize organizations with its ITSM offering. Freshworks’ strategy is aimed at providing a simple and cost-effective ITSM platform that delivers modern employee experiences by leveraging integration with the broader Freshworks ecosystem of CRM and CX solutions. It offers a standard flow that allows tickets in its CRM product, Freshdesk, to route to Freshservice to bridge external support needs with internal fulfillment. In addition, it provides features such as no-code single-click “scenario automations” to simplify the support process.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Vendor does not disclose this information

Halo Service Solutions

Halo Service Solutions, founded in 1994, is a privately held company headquartered in Stowmarket, U.K. Its operations are in the U.S., Australia, the UAE and the U.K., and it targets organizations of all sizes with its ITSM offering. Halo’s ITSM strategy is aimed at providing a scalable platform to modernize service management needs, along with providing a partnership-style relationship with its customers. Halo also provides dedicated customer service management and professional service automation (PSA) software that integrate into its ITSM platform for wider needs.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Financial services, healthcare, technology and telecom

IFS

IFS, founded in 1983, is a privately held company headquartered in Linköping, Sweden. Its operations are global and it targets organizations over 500 employees with its ITSM offering. IFS’ strategy is aimed at extending ITSM across multiple engagement channels, augmented by a broader set of ITOM and line-of-business extensions. Their all-inclusive approach to product bundling includes various discovery, asset management, endpoint management and line-of-business extensions in a single ITSM license tier. In addition, IFS offers a portfolio of adjacent products including field service management, enterprise asset management (EAM) and ERP.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Government

InvGate

InvGate, founded in 2008, is a privately held company headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Its operations are in Latin America and the U.S., and it targets organizations over 1000 employees with its ITSM offering. InvGate’s strategy is aimed at creating solutions that help companies modernize their operations quickly and efficiently. It provides a card-style UI to navigate work, as well as agent productivity features, including time tracking and gamification.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Manufacturing

Ivanti

Ivanti, formed in 2017, is a private company headquartered in South Jordan, Utah, U.S. Its operations are global, and it targets midsize and enterprise organizations between 5,000 and 40,000 employees with its ITSM offering. Ivanti’s strategy is aimed at providing comprehensive digital employee experiences leveraging the security, endpoint management and DevSecOps capabilities of its broader Ivanti Neurons platform. It provides digital employee experience management (DEX) and self-healing features bundled with ITSM, as well as integration with its unified endpoint management, vulnerability and patch management products.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Healthcare, financial services, education

ManageEngine

ManageEngine, a division of Zoho, was founded in 2002 and is a privately held company headquartered in Del Valle, Texas, U.S. Its operations are global and it targets medium-to-large enterprises with its ITSM offering. ManageEngine’s strategy is aimed at providing ITSM as part of a portfolio of integrated IT and business management products. It offers a portfolio of complementary products, including endpoint management, privileged access management, network monitoring, application monitoring and active directory management solutions.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Vendor does not disclose this information.

OpenText

OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), founded in 1992, is a public company headquartered in Waterloo, Canada. Its operations are global and it targets midsize to large enterprises with its ITSM offering. OpenText’s strategy is aimed at providing an extensible service management platform with simple, affordable, fit-for-purpose ITSM and ITAM capabilities, expanding to other lines of business. It has designed its product to enable codeless configuration and integration capabilities. OpenText took ownership of SMAX with its acquisition of Micro Focus in January 2023, providing integration opportunities with its incumbent portfolio of information management products.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Financial services, manufacturing

Serviceaide

Serviceaide, founded in 2016, is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California, U.S. Its operations are primarily in North America, Latin America and Europe and it targets midsize to large enterprises with its ITSM offering. Serviceaide’s strategy is aimed at providing a comprehensive AI-based service management solution for ITSM and line-of-business support. In addition to its core ITSM product, ChangeGear, Serviceaide also offers its ITSM product for MSPs and emerging markets.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Manufacturing, technology and telecom

ServiceNow

ServiceNow, founded in 2004, is a public company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, U.S. Its operations are global and it targets companies with more than 3000 employees with its ITSM offering. ServiceNow’s strategy is aimed at providing a single platform with a broad portfolio of IT and line-of-business applications to help customers manage workflows across their organizations and departments. Its ITSM features support highly mature organizations, with product features including native AI, process mining and workforce optimization.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Vendor does not disclose this information.

SolarWinds

SolarWinds, founded in 1999, is a public company headquartered in Austin, Texas, U.S. Its operations are global and it targets SMB, midmarket and emerging enterprise organizations. SolarWinds’ strategy is aimed at providing an easy-to-use AI-powered ITSM tool that is integrated into its broader software portfolio of monitoring and observability solutions. Its integration into the Orion Platform observability product automates converting alerts to incidents, updating alerts from incidents, mapping CI dependencies and connecting CI data into tickets.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Professional services

SymphonyAI

SymphonyAI, founded in 2017, is a privately held company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S. Its Summit division’s operations are in the U.S., APAC and the UAE, and it targets organizations with over 2,000 employees with its ITSM offering. SymphonyAI Summit’s strategy is aimed at providing AI-powered IT and enterprise workflows that simplify work and increase enterprise productivity. It focuses on providing service management and automation to address the needs of IT and adjacent lines of business with limited administrative requirements.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Technology and telecom, financial services, manufacturing

SysAid

SysAid, founded in 2002, is a privately held company headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. Its operations are global and it targets organizations of 500 to 10,000 employees. SysAid’s strategy is aimed at providing core ITSM capabilities on a low-code platform that drives more automation and orchestration across business applications and processes. In addition, it provides some native client support capabilities for endpoint diagnostics and remedial actions, including inventory and patching features.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Manufacturing

TeamDynamix

TeamDynamix, founded in 2001, is a privately held company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, U.S. Its operations are in the U.S. and Canada, and it targets organizations of 300 to 5,000 employees with its ITSM offering. TeamDynamix’s strategy is aimed at providing an easy-to-use, no-code ITSM tool that is integrated into its project portfolio management (PPM) and iPaaS products. While it maintains high presence, product features and industry-specific license options for its original market focus on the higher education vertical, TeamDynamix supports customers across other commercial and public-sector industries.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Education, state and local government

TOPdesk

TOPdesk, founded in 1997, is a privately held company headquartered in Delft, Netherlands. Its operations are global and it targets midsize enterprises with its ITSM offering. TOPdesk’s strategy is aimed at ease of use and quick implementation for its ITSM platform, while offering support for other non-IT workflows. It provides a number of out-of-the-box templates and automated actions to offer an approach to expedite customer implementation without coding.

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Top industry presence (by customers): Government, healthcare

Market Recommendations

• Ensure that ITSM platform selection is aligned with current and planned service desk and service operations capabilities by defining an 18-month ITSM practice roadmap and giving little weight to functionality that will not directly enable those service improvement objectives.

• Build a defensible ROI by going beyond ticket deflection aspirations to focus on how the ITSM platform will help support the overall maturity goals of the I&O function. These goals should be aligned with an achievable business value metric (e.g., improving business agility, customer experience).

• Transform your ITSM platform’s role from a stand-alone system of record to part of a federated toolchain by prioritizing the quality, ease, cost and support of the ITSM platform’s integration capabilities. Evaluate these in any tool selection exercise.

Evidence

¹ Market Share: IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2022

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