Executive Summary

IT Service Management

Chief information officers (CIOs) and IT leaders face the dual challenge of optimizing IT operations while driving innovation in an increasingly complex marketplace. The intricacies involved in managing a diverse array of technology environments require enterprises to harness a multitude of tools and platforms to address unique operational demands spanning various departments and functionalities. Technological advancements often outpace traditional strategies, so it is essential for IT leaders to have a comprehensive understanding of the software solutions at their disposal.

IT Management software plays a pivotal role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives. As enterprises strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maintain a competitive edge, these approaches become critical enablers of streamlined operations and effective resource allocation. Furthermore, as enterprises transition to more agile and cloud-centric architectures, the integration of comprehensive IT Management software platforms facilitates enhanced visibility, control and adaptability across the entire IT stack. This is particularly important as CIOs look to future-proof enterprise architecture and ensure that technology strategies are not only reactive but also proactive in addressing emerging challenges and opportunities.

ISG defines IT Service Management (ITSM) as a strategic approach to deploy IT services that effectively support overall business objectives. ITSM is a collection of processes and practices that guide enterprises in managing and delivering high-quality IT services to enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Key subsets and extensions of ITSM that are critical for optimizing the performance of IT environments include:

• IT Operations Management (ITOM): ITOM focuses on the operational aspects of managing IT services and infrastructure. It encompasses vital functions such as incident management, problem management, change management, performance monitoring and capacity management. The goal of ITOM is to ensure that IT services operate smoothly and effectively by optimizing resource use, minimizing service disruptions and enhancing service quality. By implementing efficient ITOM practices, IT leaders can proactively address incidents and operational challenges before they escalate, fostering an environment of continuous improvement.
• IT Asset Management (ITAM): ITAM involves the management of an enterprise's IT assets throughout the entire lifecycle—from procurement to disposal. This includes such functions as asset tracking, compliance management and software license management. Adequate oversight of IT assets not only helps enterprises optimize costs but ensures compliance with licensing agreements and regulatory requirements. By maintaining accurate inventories of IT assets, CIOs can make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and investment in new technologies, ultimately supporting strategic initiatives and enhancing operational efficiency.
• Service Integration and Management (SIAM): In the current landscape, where multiple service providers are often involved in delivering IT services, SIAM has emerged as an essential framework for ensuring seamless coordination and integration. This subset focuses on managing relationships between suppliers and ensuring collaboration to maintain service quality and delivery. For organizations that rely heavily on third-party vendors, effective SIAM practices are vital for enhancing service continuity, accountability and operational synergy. By adopting a SIAM approach, CIOs can streamline interactions with multiple vendors, enhancing accountability and driving better alignment with business goals.
• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL): Serving as a foundational framework for ITSM, ITIL provides a comprehensive set of best practices and processes designed to enhance service delivery. ITIL's service lifecycle stages emphasize the importance of continual improvement, highlighting the need for enterprises to evolve ITSM practices in a dynamic business environment. Furthermore, ITIL establishes a common language and set of standards that unify ITSM efforts across varied teams and stakeholders. By implementing ITIL guidelines, CIOs can create a cohesive ITSM strategy that drives collaboration, efficiency and innovation.

The integration of these key subsets—ITOM, ITAM, SIAM and ITIL—enables IT leaders to strategically align IT services with business objectives while fostering operational excellence and enhanced customer satisfaction. An enterprise ITSM strategy should serve not only as a tool for managing IT resources but also as a catalyst for driving transformational growth and sustained competitive advantage. Investing in these ITSM frameworks and practices allows enterprises to create resilient, adaptable IT environments.

The criticality of effective ITSM software cannot be overstated. As enterprises strive to enhance operational efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and manage increasingly complex IT environments, the opportunity exists for enterprises to re-evaluate ITSM strategies and partnerships. In an enterprise evaluation, there are four key ITSM trends to consider, including:

1. Accelerated digital transformation: The push for digital transformation initiatives across industries has been accelerated by the ongoing demand for enhanced customer experiences and streamlined operations. ITSM must support these transformations by ensuring that service delivery aligns with new business models. Enterprises should re-assess ITSM solutions to identify gaps in service capabilities and integration that may impede agility and responsiveness to market changes.
2. Evolving workforce dynamics: With the rise of hybrid and remote work environments, ITSM strategies must adapt to support a distributed workforce. Workers require seamless access to IT services and support regardless of location. By examining current ITSM offerings, enterprises can uncover solutions that facilitate better collaboration, self-service options and proactive support mechanisms to enhance user satisfaction and productivity.
3. Cost management and resource optimization: Economic uncertainty and tighter budgets have heightened the need for cost control in IT operations. Evaluating ITSM partnerships and software can reveal opportunities for consolidation, streamlining vendor relationships and renegotiating contracts. Through 2026, 85% of enterprises will rely on IT service management application marketplaces to connect software platforms across line-of-business groups. This focus on cost management not only improves financial performance but also ensures that ITSM investments align with overall business goals and deliver maximum value.
4. Enhanced focus on customer experience: As enterprises compete for customer loyalty, the ability to deliver exceptional service is paramount. ITSM plays a crucial role in building processes that prioritize customer satisfaction. A review of ITSM solutions can identify ways to incorporate features that enable better tracking of customer interactions, manage service requests effectively and provide insights into service performance. Empowering IT teams to respond swiftly to customer needs fosters lasting relationships and trust.

By focusing on the drivers behind a re-evaluation of ITSM service trends—digital transformation, workforce dynamics, cost management and customer experience—IT leaders can effectively advocate for the necessary changes to enhance service delivery and operational efficiency. A well-defined ITSM strategy will not only help enterprises meet current challenges but also position them for long-term success.

Generative AI (GenAI) plays a pivotal role in enhancing IT Management software by automating complex processes, improving decision-making and driving efficiencies across various IT functions. By leveraging GenAI, enterprises can streamline service delivery, optimize resource allocation and proactively identify and resolve issues, ultimately leading to improved operational performance. Additionally, GenAI enables IT teams to generate insights from vast amounts of data, facilitating more informed strategic planning and enhancing collaboration among teams. As enterprises embrace digital transformation, IT Management software integrated with GenAI capabilities becomes essential for staying competitive.

In the realm of ITSM, GenAI functionality is transforming how enterprise IT teams handle service requests, incident resolution and knowledge management. IT technicians can leverage features such as automated session summaries, which capture key details of interactions and help provide context in support tickets. This significantly reduces the time spent on notetaking and allows teams to focus on delivering solutions.

GenAI can also assist in command-line generation, enabling technicians to automate routine tasks by generating scripts or commands based on specific requests or scenarios. This capability minimizes the need for extensive coding knowledge, allowing less experienced staff to execute complex tasks effectively.

Additionally, GenAI enhances troubleshooting processes by narrowing problem scenarios to the most likely causes based on historical data and context cues from previous incidents. This predictive capability allows IT teams to resolve issues more quickly, reducing downtime and improving service levels.

And GenAI supports knowledge management by automatically generating knowledge articles. When a new issue is identified, GenAI can curate and create documentation that details the symptoms, remediation steps and relevant configurations. By streamlining knowledge article creation directly within application workflows, enterprises can ensure that essential information is readily available for future reference, promoting a culture of continuous improvement.

Agentic AI, while not yet available, has the potential to transform ITSM by reshaping how enterprise IT teams manage service requests, incident management and customer interactions. One possible application is intelligent virtual agents that autonomously handle routine inquiries via natural language processing, enhancing the user experience and allowing IT staff to focus on complex issues. Additionally, Agentic AI may streamline incident resolution by analyzing historical data to recommend solutions, reducing response times. Proactively, it could monitor system performance to detect anomalies and initiate actions, ultimately paving the way for a more efficient ITSM framework that improves service reliability and customer satisfaction.

CIOs and IT leaders should approach IT Management software that incorporates GenAI, LLMs and future Agentic AI capabilities with enthusiasm and caution. While these technologies offer significant benefits, they also come with unique challenges and prerequisites. A holistic evaluation must include technical aspects and business, ethical and strategic considerations. Other areas of focus include risk awareness, critical infrastructure, organizational readiness, governance and compliance and a long-term perspective on the sustainability and scalability of AI approaches.

ISG believes a methodical approach is essential to maximize competitiveness. It is critical to select the right software provider and product to improve the performance of your enterprise’s people, process, information and technology components.

The ISG Buyers Guide for ITSM software research is designed to provide a 360-degree view of a software provider’s ability to optimize the delivery, performance and governance of IT services within an enterprise. Separate Buyers Guide research reports are available for FinOps, AIOps, Observability and IT Management software.

This ISG Buyers Guide for ITSM evaluates products based on capabilities including asset and configuration management, GenAI, machine learning and automation, human-centric IT service management, incident and request management, knowledge management and service level management. To be included in this Buyers Guide, software providers must meet or exceed the inclusion criteria and have commercially available products for enterprise ITSM.

The insights gained from understanding current IT Management software providers are invaluable for IT leaders who aim to align technology investments with organizational goals, optimize workflows and foster a culture of innovation. By investing in the right tools, CIOs can unlock new avenues for growth and transformation, paving the way for enterprises to thrive.

 This Buyers Guide report evaluates the following software providers that offer products addressing key elements for ITSM: Atera, Atlassian, BMC Software, Broadcom, EasyVista, Freshworks, IBM, IFS, Ivanti, Matrix42 AG, OpenText, ServiceNow, SolarWinds, SymphonyAI, Zendesk and Zoho.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Service Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for ITSM software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for AIOps to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of AIOps technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of AIOps software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating AIOps systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds ServiceNow atop the list, followed by BMC with Broadcom and Atlassian tied for third. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. ServiceNow has done so in seven categories; BMC in five; Atlassian in four; Zendesk in two; and Broadcom, Matrix42 and SolarWinds in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Atlassian, BMC, Broadcom, Ivanti, ServiceNow and Zendesk.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Freshworks and SolarWinds.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: IBM and OpenText.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Atera, EasyVista, IFS, Matrix42, SymphonyAI and Zoho.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle ITSM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Adaptability (15%), Capability (30%), Manageability (15%), Reliability (10%) and Usability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. ServiceNow, BMC and SolarWinds were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are ServiceNow, BMC and Atlassian and Zendesk tied for third. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for IT Service Management in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $40 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents and have at least 100 full-time employees. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the past 12 months.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant ITSM products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. Providers offering functionality focused on only a subset of ITSM capabilities, such as asset management, helpdesk or remote monitoring, have been excluded. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”