Freshworks expands Freshservice with continuous discovery and dependency mapping for IT asset management – News

Customer service and support software firm Freshworks Inc. today announced an expansion of its Freshservice platform with the launch of redefined IT Asset Management, a service that provides visibility into how infrastructure supports the services that businesses depend on.

The redefined ITAM offering integrates continuous infrastructure discovery and dependency mapping directly into Freshservice and combines it with information technology service management and IT operations management. The goal is to give organizations an artificial intelligence-powered service operations platform that unifies data and workflows, assesses service impact comprehensively and shortens resolution cycles.

Although businesses have scaled up their investment in automation and AI, the underlying infrastructure data remains fragmented across disconnected tools and processes. Freshworks argues that teams often struggle with disparate systems where discovery tools and configuration management databases reside in separate silos at a time when data quality has become essential for using AI reliably and accurately in service workflows.

Freshservice redefined ITAM takes on the issue by providing automated discovery across the entire hybrid IT environment instead of stitching together multiple tools and hoping the data stays accurate and aligned.

The solution continuously maps the relationships between hardware systems, cloud resources and the business applications they support to create a high-integrity data foundation essential for AI. The data includes meaningful context to enable operational intelligence to flow directly into service workflows so issues are resolved before they impact the business.

“If infrastructure data is incomplete, outdated, or disconnected from service workflows, AI can’t reliably understand impact or provide accurate actions,” said Chief Product Officer Srini Raghavan. “By making deep discovery and dependency mapping native to Freshservice, we’ve redefined ITAM by delivering infrastructure-wide visibility and operational intelligence to power governed workflows at scale.”

Freshservice ITAM’s benefits include the replacement of static inventory with continuous discovery that allows organizations to move past traditional inventory management and manual data gathering to a system that persistently scans cloud, hybrid and on-premises environments.

Faster incident response with live dependency mapping visualizes how specific servers or cloud resources support critical business functions. In addition, newly released FireHydrant integration allows teams to quickly identify connected systems and affected services, their configuration and change history during outages to take immediate action and accelerate resolution.

Other benefits include the ability to minimize risk with predictive impact analysis, whereby teams can see exactly which services will be affected by planned updates before they’re deployed. They also get enhanced security through configuration drift detection, the ability to harvest licenses and optimize spend, and support for strengthening IT asset visibility and governance.

In pre-release testing, the shoe company New Balance Athletics Inc. has been using the redefined ITAM offering to unify service and infrastructure operations to drive transformation.

“We wanted to have a single source of truth for all of our inventory assets to be inventoried and also have the transparency and the visibility of everything that’s existing in our network… for the purpose of change control,” said Markus Gaulke, platform manager at New Balance. “So we can actually see what these business services depend on.”

Mika Yamamoto, chief integrated customer growth officer at Freshworks, spoke with theCUBE, News Media’s livestream studio, in November, when she discussed how Freshworks is aiming to “uncomplicate” customer service:

Photo: Freshworks