CA announced its SaaS service desk application CA Service Desk Manager On Demand and the service desk collaboration platform CA Open Space yesterday. Open Space, which focuses on community and collaboration between IT and the rest of an organization, is available for both CA Service Desk Manager On Demand and CA Service Desk Manager–delivered on premise.
According to the product brief, Open Space features include:
- Create, manage and subscribe to communities. Users can join existing communities, or create their own. Criteria for creating communities could be topical content, interest tags, user profiles, specific problems or other unique criteria.
- Post questions, answer other users’ questions, create and participate in discussions, record feedback and validated resolutions.
- Chat in real time or delayed collaboration about topics, problems, issues.
- Create user profiles for automatic or manual subscription, tagging, preferences, and criteria.
In addition to Service Desk Manager, Open Space will integrate with Outlook, SharePoint, iGoogle, and Ca.com. Nimsoft integration is also planned.
Interestingly, CA is releasing a mobile Open Space app for iOS, not BlackBerry, first.
The value of this product is somewhat questionable considering the existence of so many general purpose enterprise collaboration apps. However, if CA can succeed to helping IT staff communicate not just with each other, but with everyone else, it could have a very useful product on its hands. The barrier between IT and the rest of an organization be an obstacle to both resolving technical issues and implementing long-term strategic IT solutions, and it’s a problem ripe for the solving. I expect CA to expand the product beyond service desk collaboration in the future.
CA Service Desk Manager On Demand will compete with Zendesk.
CA has been expanding its cloud reach this year by acquiring cloud management software vendor 3Tera and consulting firm 4Base (see our coverage here and here).
