When speaking to prospective customers, I need to express the value of RightStar beyond the ten-second elevator pitch: "RightStar is an IT consultancy and BMC Solution Provider focused exclusively in the Business Service Management Space…." I try to convey what I feel, at least, are three important points that truly differentiate RightStar:

At RightStar every customer is a reference. My favorite example is DJO, a manufacturer of orthopedic devices and supplier to all thirty-two National Football League teams. We recently sold DJO MagicWand for an asset management project. Once we began the project, we discovered that their scanners were not compatible with MagicWand. This was surprising since we make it a point to ensure that all MagicWand customers receive our list of certified scanners. Rather than argue about who was right, we rushed five new scanners to DJO overnight at no cost. This guaranteed an on-time delivery and a very satisfied customer.

Let us tell you what is best. Customers tell us what they want, and we in turn try to give it to them. However, in many cases giving a customer exactly what they want means we would end up with an unhappy customer. We’ve learned through experience:

I was encouraged to see that eighty percent of our customers surveyed agreed with the following statement: “When I get something different from what I request, I’m confident that I’m getting the best possible solution.”

We’re committed to your success. Our customers must trust that our intent is compatible with their best interest and that we have the experience to design and deliver a solution that meets their needs. RightStar’s mission statement is to be our customers’ trusted advisor in the service management space. Stated simply, RightStar’s goal is to truly drive our customers’ success—whether it’s in terms of reducing the cost of service management, improving overall efficiency, or whatever else is important to the customer.

Let’s clear up five common myths about ITIL certification:

The class is boring. In fact, the discussions, real life examples, and simulation exercise keep students awake and engaged.

The certification exam is tricky and unfair. The Foundation test consists of forty multiple choice questions, 65% of which must be answered correctly in order to pass. Thorough review of the material should guarantee a passing score.

A classroom experience is necessary to pass the exam. Self-paced online training is available. For approximately $300, it is possible to achieve ITIL certification in your spare time. The official ITIL website also provides a sample exam and other study resources.

It's not important to one's career. Although you may not miss out on a promotion for lacking it, ITIL certification is increasingly recognized by and important to management. It can only help to have a tangible record of your service management knowledge.

The old V2 certification is good enough. V3 is a replacement of the previous release, not an add-on. There are thirteen new ITIL processes and it's important to keep up with changes to the framework.

I attended a panel discussion this week hosted by my college alumni association. The panelists were five Washington, D.C. venture capitalists and fellow alumni. Each had a different focus area, ranging from the U.S. intelligence community to the high tech sector to social entrepreneurship (individuals with solutions to society’s most pressing social problems). My main takeaway from the evening: all that really matters are great ideas.

Although I consider myself to be an entrepreneur, having started or helped start three companies, most of my time now is spent on the day-to-day reactive activities required to run a sixty-person company. It is very rare for true innovation to come from established companies. Fortunately there are plenty of good ideas at RightStar, including:

ADSync. Since there was no easy way in Remedy to synch up Active Directory accounts, we built our own utility. This brand new product has already been sold to two customers.

Service Catalog/PMG. PMG offers an actionable service catalog that works with SDE and Remedy. After seeing the demo, we realized that this is the first “game changer” in our space in a long time. RightStar quickly became a partner.

dbObjectCreator. We’re always thinking about ways to significantly reduce our SDE implementation time by automating the implementation process, leaving more time for better upfront process and design.

ScanStar for SCSM. ScanStar (a.k.a. MagicWand) will soon work with SCSM, Microsoft’s new service desk product. Microsoft’s entry into this market could be huge, meaning that ScanStar for SCSM should be a big seller.

MagicPortal. SDE Client Services did not meet a customer’s requirements, so we developed MagicPortal, a better product that we have already sold to several customers.

RightStar and Hitachi ID Systems held an identity management (IDM) webinar recently to present IDM solutions to our install base. After all, IDM automates user provisioning, role management, single sign-on, and password management to deliver improved security and lower IT costs. But despite RightStar’s involvement in IDM solutions for several years, we have only a handful of IDM customers. What’s the deal?

It could be that IDM is a difficult sell because of its complexity. According to Bill Nagal, an analyst at Forrester Research, IDM “is really a combination of at least a dozen different technologies.” Forrester evaluates IDM vendors based on fourteen different technologies, including single sign-on, federation, identity audit, password management, and provisioning. This complexity means that multiple groups and decision makers need to get involved, ranging from the Service Desk Manager to the Chief Security Officer.

In our IDM webinar, Hitachi CTO Idan Shohan said, “Technology is really the easy part. What’s difficult is getting consensus on the upfront process design.” Like a Remedy or SDE service management implementation, an IDM implementation often requires the customer to agree on what is necessary to meet business needs. This includes policies, procedures, workflows, hardware, data sources, and software. It must include all departments. Idan went on to say that a typical IDM implementation could last 100 days.

It’s interesting is that one of the key ITIL V3 processes is access management (a.k.a. IDM), which is defined as the process of granting authorized users the right to use a service. Since we have experience with ITIL processes and complex Remedy implementations, it’s a natural extension for RightStar to implement more IDM solutions.

Yesterday, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and BMC SDE Director Greg Myers shared the Dreamforce stage with Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff. Bob and Mark announced a strategic partnership to deliver BMC Service Desk Express solutions on the Force.com platform.

"The alliance between salesforce.com and BMC will accelerate IT management success with cloud computing," said Benioff. "Customers can now leverage enterprise-class IT management completely in the cloud with Force.com and BMC Software." This exciting new SaaS service desk offering is designed for customers looking for strong IT-business integration and rapid time-to-value. In fact, Greg Myers demonstrated a prototype version at Dreamworld that he said was developed on the Force.com platform in less than two months. He pointed out that this new offering would be available in the second quarter of 2010.

Although Salesforce.com is widely accepted as a standard for sales force automation, no dominant Software as a Service (SaaS) solution has emerged for service management. Service-now.com is the best known SaaS service desk competitor but they have only an estimated 250 customers and approximately 80 employees. Service-now.com offers customers an ITSM application that is licensed for use as a service provided to customers on a subscription basis, usually paid annually. Unlike BMC’s SDE or Remedy ITSM, Service-now.com does not require on-site servers, software maintenance contracts, or ongoing software patches. Several years ago, BMC created a SaaS group with the intention of rolling out on-demand versions of SDE and Remedy. Lower demand than expected caused BMC to quietly dissolve the SaaS group. However, BMC just recently began offering a hosted version of Remedy on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Organizations will benefit from this partnership with the availability of SDE on both a SaaS (subscription based) and perpetual basis. They will be able to choose if they want the ease of a cloud enabled service desk, or whether they want to perpetually own the software and run and support it in their own environment. Whatever the choice, as BMC’s #1 Service Desk Express partner RightStar will be there to help meet their service management needs.