New tools were unveiled this week designed to help IT managers improve the agility and efficiency of their IT service management (ITSM) initiatives, with a preview of Axios Systems latest assyst product and a raft of EMC announcements.

Axios pre-sales analyst Emma Berry demoed version eight of the firm's flagship product at its annual customer conference in Edinburgh, singling out a new Process Designer tool which will enable the graphical representation of processes.

"You can build new processes from scratch by dragging and dropping in the various stages, and you can view the attached processes against events," she explained. "By having more visibility you'll have better management going on and more control."
Also previewed at the conference were a new dashboard feature to give firms a real time view of "current business conditions", and powerful new search functionality designed to allow users to access events, items and knowledge procedures at the same time and view them by relevance.

Assyst 8, scheduled for release in mid-2008, will also include functionality to enable more efficient management of staff, and a Computer Telephony Integration feature which will give teams the ability to populate incident details in assyst automatically from caller details, explained Berry.

"Efficiency is rippled throughout this release and by having better efficiency you will meet customer expectations," she argued.

Ruby Suggitt, an NHS customer support desk manager, praised the Process Designer tool for its easy-to-use drag and drop functionality and the Resource Management feature. "They're both nice to haves, expecially the ability to manage resources better, because that can be a difficulty in IT," she explained. "Service management tools do a lot of the work for you - before everything was on bits of paper and in spreadsheets."

Caroline Evans, service desk manager for insurance firm NFU Mutual, said the company would not be prioritising an upgrade to version 8 because it had already developed many of the new features in-house. "But it will be useful to a lot of customers - we wouldn't have developed it first ourselves [otherwise]," she added.

EMC also expanded its ITSM footprint this week with the release of EMC IT Compliance Analyzer – Application Edition, EMC Smarts IPv6 Availability Manager, EMC IT Process Centre, and EMC IT Performance Reporter – Network Edition, all designed to improve the automation of data centra operations and increase visibility into complex environments, according to the firm.

The products cover compliance, network management, provisioning and management of storage requests, and network capacity planning, amongst other capabilities.

And in related news Managed Objects announced its Business Service Management platform could help fast track customers to version three of the ITSM best practice framework ITIL.