Symantec Helps Drive Operational Efficiencies

Symantec Helps Drive Operational Efficiencies with Workflow 7.0 and ServiceDesk 7.0

Solutions optimise and accelerate IT and business processes through automation and self-service

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced Symantec Workflow 7.0 and Symantec ServiceDesk 7.0 to help businesses maximise efficiencies and achieve significant cost savings by connecting people, processes and information. Workflow 7.0 helps customers enforce policies, automate repetitive tasks and accelerate the delivery of IT and business processes. ServiceDesk 7.0 will offer customers a new process driven and powerful ITIL-based incident, problem, change, release and knowledge management tool that improves availability and service levels.

Both Workflow 7.0 and ServiceDesk 7.0 are uniquely driven by a drag-and-drop visual designer approach, allowing businesses to develop comprehensive, automated processes without requiring a fundamental knowledge of the coding behind the applications. Due to their flexible approach, these products can integrate directly into an existing environment without requiring integration services or deep technical knowledge that is usually necessary when combining diverse technologies. Both products are built on the Symantec Management Platform, providing improved manageability and extensible integration across Symantec’s product portfolio, allowing companies to integrate security, data loss prevention, systems management, and backup and recovery. In addition, the flexible nature of the platform allows integration into third-party solutions as well.

“Organisations today are looking for ways to improve efficiencies, increase compliance and reduce costs while leveraging existing systems and resources, and building out their IT organisation as needed,” said Francis deSouza, senior vice president, Enterprise Security Group, Symantec. “Both Workflow 7.0 and ServiceDesk 7.0 provide immediate customer benefits through process automation to shorten timelines and manoeuvre through organisational structure while maintaining accountability and ensuring compliance.”

The ability to manage processes effectively continues to be a constant fixture in the minds of IT executives. In a January 2009 Gartner study titled, Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda, more than 1,500 CIOs were asked where they thought the enterprise should focus its attention and resources in an uncertain economy for improving current operations and performance. According to the report, improving business process was the number one response and has been for the past four years.

Symantec Workflow 7.0
Workflow 7.0 now makes it easier to deliver comprehensive IT and business process automation with increased support for business systems, advanced reporting, increased performance and an expanded end-user portal. Workflow can be used to automate common IT processes such as new employee provisioning, self-help service catalogues, new hardware and software requests, password reset and many more. The new version improves manageability by providing customers with a visual, self-documenting workflow designer, helping customers rapidly deliver processes by simply dragging and dropping predefined components to create a flow diagram.

New reporting features in Workflow 7.0 help businesses find inefficiencies, view trends and analyse process details to reduce bottlenecks and get more from their investments. Workflow 7.0 offers additional views to show the exact status of a process, customisable settings to show appropriate information to users and an end-user inbox for current task status, historical views and task delegation. Additionally, Workflow 7.0 has simplified workflow construction providing custom processes that are now more intuitive and easier to create in, and an all-visual environment with an enhanced debugger for multiple project, swim lane and overall views – all included in a workflow designer. Symantec partners can leverage Workflow 7.0 to provide additional services to help customers define, design and deliver workflows to support their business automation needs, optimise efficiency and enforce policy.

Symantec ServiceDesk 7.0
ServiceDesk 7.0 will accelerate and enhance service delivery from the IT organisation through process automation and self-service capabilities for end users, allowing IT to do more with less. Based on best practice processes, ServiceDesk 7.0 is designed for fast implementation, easy integration and optimisation of IT processes to deliver immediate benefits.

ServiceDesk 7.0 will provide ITIL recommended best practice processes ‘out of the box,’ including Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and Release Management. This allows companies to easily implement a full ITIL solution, which provides more efficient IT service centre operations and helps decrease ticket volumes, improve response times and increase customer satisfaction. ServiceDesk 7.0 will also allow for easy integration and coordination between different Symantec products and other remediation data tools and third-party applications, such as SharePoint.

ServiceDesk 7.0 is designed to increase the process automation capabilities of the IT department to help drive down the overall costs of IT management. Improved interfaces provide end users with self-service capabilities, particularly for problems that should not require the full attention of help desk professionals, allowing for faster problem resolution and giving IT staff more time to focus their valuable resources on more complex and strategic tasks.

“We have always looked for ways to cut expenses and reduce complexity, but it has become an even greater focus for us in today’s economic environment,” said Matt Giblin, IT manager, Mercy Health Services. “Both Workflow 7.0 and ServiceDesk 7.0 help us achieve these goals by ensuring that our processes are automated, accountable and documented. With these solutions in place, we can now spend more time performing strategic IT functions instead of wasting time performing repetitive routine IT tasks manually.”

Licensing and Availability
Workflow Solution 7.0 is now available and ServiceDesk 7.0 is scheduled to be available shortly, directly from Symantec or through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorised resellers, distributors and systems integrators. For more information, please visit http://www.symantec.com/business/workflow-solution and http://www.symantec.com/business/service-desk.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

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