As businesses outsource more and more functions to IT service providers and MSPs, they potentially need a way to track all of those relationships and associated service level agreements (SLAs).
That's where 4me enters the picture. The company, which developed a service integration and management (SIAM) platform, has raised $1.65 million in seed funding from Storm Ventures. 4me claims the platform can manage multiple levels of service providers -- everything from local support departments to regional shared service centers and external MSPs.
Addressing Two Big Requirements
4me claims to address two main challenges that businesses face with outsourced providers.
First, the ability to collect insight into the level of service that MSPs and internal service providers are delivering has long eluded companies. 4me allows the services from the different providers to be linked together into a hierarchy that reflects how services from MSPs are combined with services from internal support teams to deliver the business services to the enterprise employees. The company claims that being able to see, in real-time, which service providers are not meeting their targets and why that is happening, is how 4me makes it possible for the SIAM function to be effective.
Second, 4me claims to offer seamless collaboration with internal and external personnel. The company claims that even organizations that use different service management tools can be integrated seamlessly into 4me to provide a smooth experience for all involved. With 4me, each support organization can set up its own secure 4me account, which they configure so that it is optimized for the support of their internal processes. Organizations can decide to link their 4me accounts.
Trusted Connections
These links are called a ‘trust’ within the software. A trust takes less than a minute to established and does not require any technical skills, the company states.
A trust between two organizations allows:
- SLAs to be established for the services they provide to each other,
- requests to be assigned to another organization, provided that the request concerns a service that the other organization is responsible for,
- the support responsibility for configuration items (CIs or assets) can be transferred to an external service provider, while the financial owner still keeps the CI in its 4me account,
- one or both organizations to allow the other to assign change tasks or projects to them,
- one organization to provide first line support (the service desk function) to the other organization.
As the company uses this new funding to accelerate their growth, it will be interesting to see if or how enterprises embrace the technology. We will keep you updated on this company's growth.
