The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of processes for enterprises seeking a service centric approach to managing their IT operations rather than, following a system based approach. The latest release of ITIL is version 3 and uses a slightly different terminology from ITIL v2.

ITILv2 is predominantly adopted in the enterprise while ITILv3 adoption is still nascent. For the purposes of discussion in this posting, I shall use ITIL v2 terminology.

If you are wondering what does ITIL bring to the table? By implementing all the ITIL libraries in combination with a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), enterprises have saved approximately 25%-30% of their IT operations budget.

The libraries of ITIL that focuses on operational efficiency are Service Delivery and Service Support. Very briefly, Service Support deals with the day to day running of services without interruption while meeting business SLA’s. Service Delivery deals with the planning, management and budgeting of services in general.  Offering such services in the cloud is compelling for enterprises regardless of where they are hosted (private datacenters (cloud) or public cloud) for the reasons mentioned below:

1. Reduced implementation costs for ITIL/ITSM

2. Reduced license costs

3. Savings over provisioning of zero hardware for hosting ITIL/ITSM products

4. Focus on operational efficiency rather than, implementation details of ITIL/ITSM products

5. Gain a true understanding of the dependencies between IT and business much sooner than what would typically consume in non cloud environments.

Service-now provides ITIL/ITSM on demand with the promise of delivering the above benefits to its customers. The diagram below sums up the integration between Service-now and an enterprise hosted in a private data center or in a public cloud (Amazon EC2).

The practitioners of ITIL/ITSM would know that the interface for incident management is a Service Desk and this is provided as a part of Service-now service. It is interesting to note that Service-now provides the flexibility of integrating a service desk such as customer service/support module from Salesforce (the pioneer in SaaS segment). The integration mechanisms between an enterprise and service-now can be done through standard communication mechanisms such as Web Services, JDBC and JMS.  Service-now also offers an on premise version of its service. The takeaway is that there will more of such combination of multiple practices across an IT division that will truly make cloud services and cloud computing compelling for firms to adopt in the future.