The Fruition of IT asset management as a service?

Forgive the pun, but I have been talking to Fruition Partners and it has an interesting approach to IT asset management offered as a service (which I’d see as an enabler for good governance). Essentially, Fruition Partners is a consultancy, focussed around ServiceNow, the enterprise IT cloud service platform. Fruition Partners helps you optimise your service management possibilities (and it understands ITIL, which is a good basis for ITSM, in my book, albeit not the only one). It’s a ServiceNow Master Solutions Partner that claims 10+ years of service management experience, with 400+ ServiceNow implementations managed by 200+ experienced staff, including 50+ certified ServiceNow experts.

ServiceNow seems to be the up-and-coming name in ITSM—see here, for example. It seems to be a good platform for Fruition to base itself around. Fruition claims to cover the whole lifecycle from Strategy, through Design, Build, Run and and Enhance, and it offfers the only SerrviceNow App store currently available. It also offers help with BMC tools.

Some interesting additional points. Fruition offers NotesNow, to take control of managing Notes asssets—what a pity that Ray Ozzie didn’t think to build something like this in from the start. I like Notes but it can have issues. Usually, if it hasn’t been well-managed in the past, the first thing is to find out how many Notes databases you have and where they are. Back when I was especially interested in Notes, I remember that one of the common problems was loss of data, when a department spawned a duplicate database no-one else knew about. This sucked up a percentage of the data and, effectively, lost it to the organisation as a whole (an especial issue when someone visited from out of the department and thought s/he was updating the corporate Notes database and wasn’t). Fruition has ways of computing complexity, flagging high priority issues and assessing usage—so this isn’t just a dumb asset counting tool.

Fruition sees ServiceNow as the potential Business Platform as a Service (BPaaS) for the future, with a healthy TAM (Total Available Market) to grow into. I guess it’ll have some competition there, but, in addition to ITSM, ServiceNow has the workflow (and KPI and SLA management) features to support an organisation’s Legal, HR, Field Service, Call Centre and Procurement functions.

Oh, and Fruition Partners is getting excited about presenting its first conference “dedicated to developing on the ServiceNow platform”, fruDevCon14 Oct 5–9, 2014, in Chicago, USA. This is ‘new development’ indeed and represents a bit of a trend (presumably inspired by Salesforce, which started as a CRM service and became a general development platform).