I’m normally a sound sleeper, but Tuesday morning around 1:30 I awoke with a start and was mildly anxiously awake for two hours.

I realized it was the excitement of Monday morning’s official unveiling of our new name, Ivanti—plus the statement CMO Steve Morton made during his presentation. Ivanti is the now one of the world’s largest providers of IT service management solutions.

My post-midnight insomnia primed the pump mentally for Tuesday’s first breakout session of Sales Kickoff 2017, titled “Modernization of IT Services” and hosted by Ivanti’s ITSM evangelist, Matt Hooper. He opened with a quotable quote:

“It’s not IT and the business. IT is the business. Even more so than the accounting function, IT is the only function that spans the entire business. And ITSM has never been more important. It’s the governance and decision making around IT activities.”

Presented in a mock sales “discovery, assessment, and demo” format for the benefit of the session’s audience of Ivanti sales representatives and systems engineers, Matt shared his insights about the ITSM market and drew on the experience and demos of SE’s. He also tapped the first-hand experience of customer Nick Gehr of Aviall, a Boeing Company, as well as the humor-laden competitive overview of BMC, ServiceNow, and Cherwell presented by Ivanti’s Kevin J. Smith—“Kevin J”—who has authored the new book World-class IT Service Management that will be available soon.

All things user experience

Nick Gehr is Aviall’s manager of Enterprise Applications and Support Services. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Aviall, Inc. is the world's largest provider of new aviation parts and related aftermarket services. The company markets and distributes products for more than 240 manufacturers and offers approximately two million catalogue items from 40 customer service centers located in North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Nick’s IT group deals with all things user experience and he’s an advocate of Ivanti’s Total User Management integration between its endpoint management and service management technologies and the implementation of Workspaces.

The unfair advantage

Kevin Smith explained, “We’ve created an ITSM juggernaut. Our market’s never seen anything like this before—the combination of HEAT and LANDESK coming together.”

He added, “The help desk of the 80’s fixed PCs and printers. Then it was about IT processes, then reducing costs and increasing the value of IT. From there it was about automating fulfillment beyond IT to where we are today—providing a complete, integrated platform for the digital enterprise. Be aggressive vs. our competitors. There’s nobody like us. We now have the Unfair Advantage.”