SolarWinds, the provider of simple, powerful, and secure observability and IT management software, is announcing the advancement of AI and ML capabilities within its IT service management (ITSM) solution, SolarWinds Service Desk. Introducing a new AI virtual agent to the solution, Service Desk’s latest innovations work in tandem to alleviate the pains of IT practitioners operating within an increasingly complex space.
The progressively intricate environments of hybrid/multi-cloud workflows have undoubtedly impacted IT practitioners in every enterprise, in any industry. According to the company, SolarWinds’ innovations in AI and ML aim to enable IT professionals to focus on tasks that require their expertise most, as opposed to being burdened by massive ticket volumes and constant troubleshooting amplified by complex work environments.
SolarWinds’ cloud native Service Desk has long been a champion of simplistic, efficient IT management through its offerings of IT asset, change, and incident management, according to the vendor.
“At the end of the day, we're focused on making our customers and the IT professionals that use our products day-in day-out—as they have over the past 15 years—lives easier,” said Cullen Childress, GVP of product management at SolarWinds. “And [this is due] in large part…to [our] AI and ML investments in ITSM.”
The new Service Desk Virtual Agent answers user questions, supports troubleshooting, and continuously learns based on user interactions to improve the quality of its information. Over time, the AI virtual agent will provide more helpful and relevant information due to its collection of specific customer data.
“The virtual agent capability is a nonhuman, AI-powered NLU- and NLP-driven, chat-based experience that breaks down [the natural language of user queries] to better understand exactly what they [the query] are, and based off of that, be able to automatically—either in Teams, Slack, their mobile device, or in the portal chat interface—provide those recommended knowledge base articles for self-service right then and there,” said Childress.
In terms of ticket management, the AI virtual agent within Service Desk is further invaluable. As Childress put it, “As things within these environments and their complexities get more and more intricate, the tickets that are coming in—even if end-user numbers stay the same—that volume is increasing. And so, the virtual agent capability, as it learns and gets better, only further deflects the tickets that actually get escalated to those agents, allowing for better service levels for the employees to be able to address questions or needs that they end up having…[enabling] the agents themselves to work on the much more complicated problems.”
Service Desk is quick to implement, accelerating time-to-value while simultaneously improving efficiency through automated ticket routing and AI-powered smart suggestions. The solutions can also be optimized and customized via Service Desk’s integrations with over 200 popular cloud applications, according to the vendor.
“When users go to the Service Desk portal and type an incident, we can immediately be able to bring up recommended knowledge base articles to help them solve those problems,” said Childress.
Based on a SolarWinds customer survey, Service Desk AI features reduced ticket resolution time for IT teams by 24%, with an additional average of 23 hours saved per week. The surveyed group also reported a reduction of downtime by 21% on average, as well as a 24% average increase in progress toward achieving service-level agreements (SLAs).
Ultimately, "Service Desk allows agents to do more and enhance service levels with less, because we all know that we're operating in a resource and budget constrained world, and that's what is inspiring everything that we're doing,” explained Childress.
By implementing SolarWinds Service Desk and its accompanying virtual agent, enterprises can transform their archaic, inefficient ticket management system into intelligent service request workflows that benefit the entire organization.
In the past year, SolarWinds has released cloud-based and hybrid observability solutions, as well as a new partner program. The company will continue their AI investments, along with a new enterprise service management (ESM) solution for department-specific service portals, ticket management systems, and service catalogs later this year.
“To us, this is not just a checkbox; it's actually meeting our end-users where they are integrating it within our existing AI and ML investments that we've made for deflection and automated recommendations,” concluded Childress. “The backplane investments we've made over the past four years and our ITSM portfolio as it relates to AI and ML is unique.”
To learn more about SolarWinds’ ITSM solution upgrades, please visit https://www.solarwinds.com/?cmp.