Independent study conducted by "Research in Action" places REALTECH among the top three providers of IT service management solutions for SAP landscapes.

Walldorf, March 20, 2013 - REALTECH AG, a provider of software solutions for enterprise-wide IT management and technology consultancy specialized in SAP, received an excellent rating from "Research in Action" for its IT service management solution theGuard!. "Decision Matrix: IT Service Management for SAP-Centric Environments" is a study authored by Dr. Thomas Mendel, managing director Research in Action GmbH. It examines the scope of services and outlook of leading IT service management software providers. The analyst places REALTECH's theGuard! IT management software among the top three products for managing SAP environments.

The analysts emphasize that theGuard! is a highly integrated and modular solution that allows companies to reduce their administrative overhead and the effort of configuring their SAP environments. One major differentiator is its centralized CMDB (Configuration Management Database) that provides fast and easy access to all relevant data pertaining to an infrastructure component. It contains information about every hardware and software component within a company and its private clouds. This includes normalized device properties, their configurations, their interrelations, and real-time performance indicators. Moreover, a solution for mobile management and public cloud management is on the two year roadmap for theGuard!."Overall, REALTECH offers the most innovative and complete SAP-centric IT service management solution at a highly competitive price," concludes Dr. Thomas Mendel.

According to Research in Action, the percentage of SAP systems installed in Germany is higher than in any other country in the world. SAP services like consulting, implementation, system integration, support, and outsourcing and hosting make up roughly 25 percent of the overall IT market in Germany. Roughly 70 percent of all outsourcing contracts contain some element of SAP hosting. This situation is unique for countries with well-developed IT markets. This, however, also means that SAP user companies rely heavily on the smooth and efficient functioning of their system environments. Furthermore, IT departments spend a significant portion of their IT budgets on ensuring the fail-safe operation of their existing SAP systems. IT organizations use specialized IT service management tools to meet their monitoring, optimization, availability, support and system management requirements.

The analysis conducted by Research in Action provides IT decision makers looking to purchase this type of software with a strong basis for informed investment decisions. In the report, the analysts examine products from leading providers and a bundle of different open source solutions. The examination is based on 14 criteria that are divided into the categories strategy and execution. The strategy assessment includes, for example, the provider's power to innovate and market understanding in addition to its product, sales, marketing and partner strategy. The execution category focuses on questions such as unique selling propositions, architecture, quality, scalability, pricing, and support.

With a total of seven solutions evaluated, REALTECH's IT service management solution theGuard! earned a place among the top three solutions. Its unique selling propositions, pricing, and the quality of the overall product, its architecture and support received particularly high and top marks.

"Innovation in the market will continue and the rate of change will even accelerate," says Dr. Thomas Mendel. "The next few years will see a broader adoption of IT service management SaaS, hybrid clouds, billing and back charging as well as more advanced use of IT financial management and the adoption of big data concepts for real-time performance and analytics," Mendel continues.

The full study in PDF format is available for download here.
More information on our theGuard! software portfolio is available under www.realtech.com/software

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