IT-help-desk

This campus IT service gaining popularity


Amherst College joins growing roster of higher education colleges turning to a specific IT help desk

IT-help-deskAs technology continues to saturate campus life, IT departments are turning to cloud-based help desk technologies to fulfill student and admin requests.

One technology in particular, Samanage, a provider of a multi-tenant, unified service desk and asset management cloud solution, is gaining traction with a number of large-scale higher-ed institutions.

Recently, Amherst College became the latest in a growing roster of customers in the higher-education industry who are turning to the company’s “true-cloud solution” to improve efficiency and deliver better business value, said the company.

Amherst College, which is located in Massachusetts, has 1,800 students and more than 200 faculty members. The 1,000 acre campus is home to over a dozen teaching and research laboratories and a NSF-funded computational cluster with over 124 processors.

Amherst’s IT Support Services team took the opportunity to start fresh after having used “Request Tracker” for several years. With what the College explains was limited support and lack of future development plans, the solution was already outdated and no longer met their needs.

According to Luis Hernández, director of IT Support Services at Amherst, “We knew we needed a modern product that was fully supported, based on a scalable technology with room for growth and additional features.”

After doing extensive research and consulting with peers in their industry, Hernández and his team created a list of more extensive purchasing requirements, including:

  • •              Ease of deployment
  • •              Ease of use
  • •              Full functionality for asset and incident management
  • •              Reporting capabilities
  • •              Cost effectiveness

Amherst selected Samanage because of its ease of deployment, attractive price point and the company’s reputation among other educational institutions. After a quick implementation, the IT team began working with Samanage’s IT service desk and realized immediate process improvements.

One of the unexpected benefits was the ability to automatically assign tickets to a group with clearly defined roles identifying who is responsible for each category and/or subcategory.

“With six IT departments and 21 categories, the hierarchy can get complicated,” said Hernández. “With Samanage, we can now clearly delineate who can see what within each role.”

Hernández also commented on what Samanage offers beyond the day to day product experience. The company has created a strong customer community, built on ongoing customer participation. “We weren’t just buying a product, we bought into a support model with a strong emphasis on the customer community,” he explained.

Material from a press release was used in this report.

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