Shopping™3.2 Delivers Rapid Cost Reductions and Real ROI

London & New York, Embargoed until 17.00 BST on 9 September 2010 – 1E, a software and services company that improves IT efficiency by identifying and reducing costs and waste in hardware, software, energy and time, today announced Shopping 3.2, its self-service application provisioning portal. Shopping™ delivers rapid and significant IT help desk cost reductions and ROI by empowering employees to request and automatically install software applications via an online self-service shopping experience.

David Coyle, research VP at Gartner says: “If a self-service project is run correctly, the benefits go well beyond service desk contact reduction and can improve customer satisfaction, provide incident trend analysis, identify training opportunities, and consolidate the knowledge that currently exists in silos across the support organization.”

Shopping delivers the applications that employees need within minutes of approval of the initial request, without helpdesk intervention. For licensed software, a check is made to ensure sufficient licenses exist. Software can also be rented on a temporary basis, enabling licenses to be reclaimed and re-used later, thereby empowering organizations to reduce their software spend.

Shopping 3.2 integrates with service management and ticketing systems such as HP Service Manager and BMC Remedy. New features include: multi-language and multi-forest support for organizations with a global footprint; an end-user uninstall capability to empower users to give back licenses for software they no longer need; and automatic approval to streamline the approval process for Shopping ‘super-users.’

Brooks Truitt, Global Service Delivery Manager at Syngenta, says: “We calculated that each request was costing us between $30 [£20] and $50 [£33] to handle, so there were significant savings to be made by allowing our users to search for, order and then receive the applications they needed by themselves. In fact, with an average of $40 [£26] saved per request, we’re saving approximately $148,000 [£96,000] per month, which comes to about $1,776,000 [£1,143,235] per year. ”

“Think of Shopping as a kind of enterprise software store – a familiar, easy-to-use library of apps where your employees can shop for the software they need, when they need it – and get it, in minutes,” says Sumir Karayi, CEO, 1E. “Quickly customizable to fit your corporate identity, Shopping offers a user experience not dissimilar to that of buying a book on Amazon or making a purchase on eBay.”

Shopping 3.2 is scalable across all organizations and operates in any Windows environment.