IT Support

Amherst Revamps IT Support with Cloud Service Desk

• By Rhea Kelly
• 12/03/14

Massachusetts' Amherst College is refreshing its help desk with a cloud solution from Samanage. The college's IT department supports 1,800 students, 200-plus faculty members, a dozen teaching and research laboratories and a NSF-funded computational cluster with more than 124 processors.

When the institution's legacy help desk software became outdated, with limited support and no future development plans, the IT Support Services team began looking for revamp. "We knew we needed a modern product that was fully supported, based on a scalable technology with room for growth and additional features," said Luis Hernández, director of IT support services, in a prepared statement. The team's purchasing requirements included ease of deployment; ease of use; full functionality for asset and incident management; reporting capabilities; and cost effectiveness.

After implementing Samanage's IT service desk, Amherst's IT team was able to quickly make process improvements, according to a press release. For example, one unexpected benefit was "the ability to automatically assign tickets to a group with clearly defined roles identifying who is responsible for each category and/or subcategory." As Hernández explained, "With six IT departments and 21 categories, the hierarchy can get complicated. With Samanage, we can now clearly delineate who can see what within each role."

Another benefit has been Samanage's active customer community. "We weren't just buying a product," said Hernández. "We bought into a support model with a strong emphasis on the customer community."