Why Integration Is Essential for Service Desks and MSPs
As service desks and managed service providers (MSPs) take on broader operational responsibility, the complexity of their toolsets continues to grow. Asset management platforms, IT service management (ITSM) tools, identity systems and booking platforms often operate in parallel, creating silos of data and increasing reliance on manual intervention. For many teams, integration is no longer a “nice to have”; it has become a critical enabler of efficiency, accuracy and scalability.
Reducing Manual Work Through Connected Systems
One of the most immediate benefits of integration is the reduction of duplicated effort. When systems operate independently, service desk teams are often required to update asset records, user permissions and device statuses in multiple places. This not only consumes time but also increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
By connecting operational systems, such as asset management platforms, ITSM tools and access controls, updates can be automated and synchronised. Device check-ins, status changes or user allocations can be reflected in real time, reducing administrative overhead and allowing analysts to focus on higher-value tasks.
Improving Visibility and Decision-Making
Integrated environments also provide clearer visibility across the service landscape. When live operational data feeds directly into reporting tools, service desks gain insight into usage patterns, peak demand, device performance and recurring issues. This level of transparency supports more informed decision-making, from capacity planning and budget forecasting to identifying areas for service improvement.
For MSPs managing multiple client environments, centralised reporting can be particularly valuable. A consistent, integrated data view enables faster issue resolution, clearer client reporting and stronger evidence for service recommendations.
Supporting Compliance and Audit Readiness
With increasing regulatory and security expectations, maintaining accurate audit trails is essential. Integrated systems help ensure that asset movements, user access, and device usage are automatically recorded and time-stamped. This creates a reliable source of truth that supports compliance requirements without adding manual documentation work for service desk teams.
A Practical Example of Integration in Action
In real-world scenarios, integration often plays a critical role during system migrations or service changes. For example, when organisations transition to new library, asset or management platforms, seamless integration can help ensure continuity of service and accurate data flow from day one. Successfully aligned systems reduce disruption for end users while maintaining operational control behind the scenes.
Smart Locker Integrations
Smart locker integrations help organisations automate device management securely and at scale. The LapSafe® cloud based platform, ONARKEN®, integrates with systems teams already use, including identity management tools such as Microsoft Active Directory and IT service management platforms like ServiceNow®. Full API support enables automation across operational workflows. IT teams can trigger device swaps and collections through tickets, while estates and facilities teams manage locker allocation via existing booking systems. Administrators gain visibility through integrated dashboards showing usage, issues and trends. Built around permission based access and secure data handling, these integrations support governance and compliance, enabling service desks and MSPs to scale consistent, user focused services across departments, sites and customer environments without added complexity overall.
Written by Kay Tilbury, LapSafe.
Speaker Q&A: Dean Clayton
Dean Clayton, Senior Product Manager, Service Management at OpenText will be taking to the stage at SITS for Teach Your Workflows to Think (So You Don’t Have To).
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Talking with customers and seeing their reaction when our AI capabilities in OpenText Service Management start delivering real results.
There’s a genuine moment of excitement when they see it working in their own environment making a measurable difference.
If I’m honest though, it’s what happens next, those moments, when they start connecting the dots and imagining what else they can automate with Aviator Agent workflows, are always incredibly rewarding.
What's one workflow that you've seen AI transform in a way that genuinely surprised you?
We’ve seen some impressive ideas emerge in product development — from chatbots that can fulfil requests end to end without human intervention, to AI helping accelerate the product development process itself. But I’m going to give an example from one of our customers.
They had recently completed training on our Aviator agent workflow capabilities and were eager to put in action, specifically, removing manual effort involved to assign tickets to the right teams. After an initial sharing of ideas and approaches, they moved incredibly quickly and built an Aviator Agent workflow for ticket assignment.
What made it particularly interesting was that they didn’t rely solely on looking at similar historical tickets.
Instead, they took a document-centric approach: documenting what each team is responsible for and then using AI to interpret that information and determine the most appropriate assignment.
For me, that was a great example of where this technology is heading. Document-centric configuration feels like the next step beyond traditional low-code or no-code approaches, helping organisations get value faster, while giving business / service owners more direct control over how their services are delivered.
How did you get into agentic AI and what made you realise rule-based automation wasn't enough?
As a Product Manager, we started looking at how to apply GenAI in our product back in early 2023. At the time, many of the demonstrations in the market were focused on relatively simple chatbot scenarios, but it was clear to us that the potential went far beyond that. We could see an opportunity to use AI not just to answer questions, but to actively streamline and improve support operations.
In 2024, we released our first iteration of autonomous AI capabilities, designed not just for user interaction through a chatbot, but to enable AI to take action and get work done independently.
Initially, this was focused on simpler tasks, but even then, it was obvious that support operations were entering a new era.
Rules are useful when every step is predictable, but real support environments are often more dynamic and nuanced than that. Agentic AI opens the door to handling those complexities in a much more flexible and scalable way.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
For me, it’s all about the conversations. I’m really looking forward to meeting people at the booth and in my session, hearing about the challenges they’re trying to solve, and understanding what they want to achieve with AI.
Those interactions are incredibly valuable. Of course, they’re a chance to show how our products can help but just as importantly, they often spark new ideas. Some of the best use cases come directly from those discussions, where a real-world challenge opens up a new way of thinking about how AI can be applied.
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
That AI doesn’t have to be intimidating. Every organisation has its own path when it comes to trust and adoption, and there are plenty of ways to start small, move at the right pace, and still see meaningful value.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Meet the brand: Enably
Enably was founded by people who've worked inside service and IT organisations and spotted the same problem everywhere: the tools exist, but the orchestration doesn't. At SITS 2026, they're making the case for agentic service management, a smarter way to connect people, AI, and processes end to end. We spoke to the team about what it really takes to move beyond task automation and into full-scale agentic service transformation.
What does Enably do?
Enably helps service leaders transform their operations with AI‑powered, agentic enterprise orchestration the next evolution of automation.
We design and deliver environments where AI agents, people, and processes work together intelligently, enabling organisations to:
- Reduce operational friction
- Unlock capacity across teams
- Deliver higher‑quality service at scale
- Turn reactive service management into proactive, predictive operations
- Service organisations run smoother, smarter, and more autonomously.
How did you get started?
We founded Enably after years working inside service and IT organisations, all wrestling with the same challenge. Leaders have the tools but not the orchestration to make them truly work. Automations are built in isolation with AI bolted on and service teams were still drowning in manual complexity.
We created Enably to change that by focusing on the operational architecture that connects everything together. Today, we help organisations shift from task automation to agentic, end‑to‑end service transformation that delivers real outcomes leaders can measure. This is why we partner with Workato as one of the key enablers to unlocking true value for Service teams through their IT Support and Licensing Agentic Genies.
What are you looking forward to most at SITS26?
SITS is where service leaders come to talk frankly about what’s working and what’s not. We’re most excited about the conversations around that we can have with peers from the industry about:
- The rise of agentic operations in service management
- How leaders are preparing for AI‑driven service models
- What barriers are stopping organisations from scaling automation effectively
- The changing expectations being placed on service teams
We love the fact that creating Enably gives us the opportunity to meet and support of leaders who are genuinely ready to challenge the status quo and explore what the next generation of service operations looks like.
Why should visitors come to your stand?
If you’re a service leader looking for practical, strategic ways to evolve with AI and automation, our stand is where you’ll get real, human, experience‑led advice — not theory, not hype.
Visitors can expect:
- Industry experience and lesson learned - Come along and chat to us about our experiences deploying AI, automation, orchestration, or service operations we’ll give you immediate, actionable guidance.
- Demos that show what agentic orchestration actually looks like - Not abstract concepts real examples of how Workato can help your organisation unlock true value by connecting workflows, data, and AI to transform service delivery.
- Clear, honest conversations about what will (and won’t) work - We’ll help you make sense of the noise and focus on the steps that deliver impact with governance and with true value
- An SITS‑exclusive offer - We’re offering a small number of special event‑only FREE assessment package designed specifically for service leaders who want a clear roadmap to agentic operations. Visit the stand to unlock the offer
Find Enably on stand 160.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Speaker Q&A: Csaba Járomi
Csaba Járomi, Senior Director, Solutions Consulting, EMEA at GoTo will be taking to the stage at SITS for No Longer Science Fiction: Putting AI to Work for SMB Service Desks Today
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Helping customers and providing them with repeatable value using our software.
How did you get into the world of AI for IT support?
It came with the 20 year history in ITSM, natural progression into Agentic models servicing this area.
For a service desk team with limited time and budget, what is the one AI use case you would recommend they tackle first, and why?
Automate the necessary administration and recordkeeping, that takes time, but probably the easiest to automate via agents.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
The energy - I have been attending probably 10 or more and it is always very positive, buzzing and insightful.
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
AI is promising a lot, but generic approaches can lead to disappointing outcomes. Approach AI implementations in ITSM with highly specific goals and measures in mind, and find the vendor that supports these specific workstream efforts the best.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Meet the brand: HCL Software
At SITS 2026, HCLSoftware is bringing a bold idea to the show floor: exponential intelligence. We sat down with the team to find out what that means in practice, and why it could change the way you think about service management.
What does HCLSoftware do?
HCLSoftware is the software division of HCLTech and a global leader in enterprise software innovation. We develop, market, and support a broad portfolio of solutions spanning AI and intelligent operations, cybersecurity, data and analytics, total experience, and sovereign collaboration.
Our software helps organisations simplify operations, secure their digital environments, and deliver better experiences; whether that’s through AI-driven IT and service management, endpoint and infrastructure automation, secure DevOps, or data-led decision making.
Today, HCLSoftware serves over 20,000 organisations worldwide, including a majority of the Fortune 100 and nearly half of the Fortune 500.
How did you get started?
HCLSoftware’s journey is rooted in HCLTech’s legacy, which began in 1976. As HCLTech evolved into a global technology leader, it built deep expertise across infrastructure, applications, and operations, creating the foundation for HCLSoftware to emerge as a focused software powerhouse.
Over time, HCLSoftware has grown through strategic investments and acquisitions, unlocking value in established products and modernising them with cloud, automation, and AI. This approach has allowed us to continuously innovate while supporting customers and partners at scale.
What are you looking forward to most at SITS?
We’re looking forward to engaging with IT and service management leaders on how the role of service management is evolving beyond traditional workflows.
At SITS, we’re especially excited to introduce the concept of exponential intelligence, a continuous feedback loop where AI and humans learn from each other and improve together over time.
We’re keen to have practical conversations around how organisations can move beyond static automation to systems that continuously improve resolution speed, service quality, and organisational knowledge, delivering measurable outcomes like faster MTTR and better service experiences.
Why should visitors come to your stand?
If you’re exploring how to move beyond conventional ITSM and unlock real, measurable impact from AI, our stand is worth a visit. We’ll be discussing how our service management platform is built on exponential intelligence, enabling a two-way learning model where AI not only resolves issues but also learns from humans, while actively helping teams upskill and close knowledge gaps.
Visit us to see how this approach drives faster resolution, improves service quality, and transforms service management into a continuously improving system, not just a ticketing workflow.
Find HCL Software on stand 411.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
The SITS features you need on your radar
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show is returning to Excel London on 13-14 May 2026.
Along with so many of the well know vendors that have all rebooked from last year, we are welcoming new exhibitors Salesforce, Monday and Enably.
Take a look at what’s on at this year's show:
Breakfast briefing day 1 – ManageEngine. Kick off day one with a free breakfast session exploring how to evaluate AI capabilities in ITSM without overcommitting to the wrong initiatives. Speaker will introduce the AI Capability Spectrum framework, helping you identify where to invest for fast ROI and where to tread carefully. Book here.
Breakfast briefing day 2 – Freshworks. Start day two with a free breakfast session looking at how infrastructure visibility can transform fragmented IT environments into a single source of truth. You'll leave with practical insights on anticipating incidents, managing change, and turning your infrastructure into a real performance advantage. Book here.
Flexible Working Zone – Need to step away from the buzz of the show to take a call or check emails? This is your space to catch up on work in comfort and peace.
Hot topics – Discover practical solutions to common challenges in interactive roundtable sessions. Learn from experienced professionals and industry leaders. Open to all attendees - book your seat for a 40-minute live workshop (limited to 10 seats per session). Sponsored by Xurrent.
Networking drinks – The perfect place to network, finalise your connections, and decompress with your colleagues at the end of the day. Head over to the Show Bar inside the hall from 4.30pm on day 1 for music and free drinks (non alcoholic alternatives available).
Lizzy Bernthal book – Speaker Lizzy Bernthal will be at the show with her #No 1 Bestselling book ‘The Courage to be You: The Key to Unlock Your Resilience and Confidence as a Leader’. Don't miss her session on day 1 at 3pm 'Changing boardroom dynamics without body armour'.
Theatres – With three theatres and a keynote stage to explore, there's no shortage of expert-led sessions covering the topics that matter most to IT support and service desk professionals.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show is taking place at Excel on the 13-14-May 2026. For further information and to book your free ticket, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Meet the Brand: Salesforce
We're excited to welcome Salesforce to SITS 2026. As one of the world's leading CRM and AI platforms, Salesforce helps service and support teams work smarter, resolve issues faster, and deliver experiences that customers actually remember. Head to their stand to see how they're shaping the future of service management.
Ahead of their appearance at SITS 2026, we caught up with the team to find out how they're helping IT and service desk teams move beyond tickets and portals to AI-powered support that actually gets things done.
What does Salesforce do?
Salesforce is the #1 AI CRM, helping organisations become Agentic Enterprises, where humans and AI agents drive customer success together. We've moved beyond the old world of portals and tickets to intelligent, conversational support that resolves issues in minutes, not hours.
For employees, we meet them where they work – in Slack, Teams, or your portal – with AI agents that handle everything from password resets to software access requests, instantly. For IT teams, agents assist with incident classification, root cause analysis, and proactive problem detection. For the business, we unify IT services, processes, and assets on one trusted platform governed by the same rules and permissions that guide human work.
The result: faster resolutions, greater productivity, reduced IT costs, and elevated employee experiences.
How did you get started?
Salesforce was founded in 1999 with a bold idea: that software should be accessible, flexible, and centred around the customer. Over the past 25+ years, that vision has grown into a global platform trusted by over 150,000 companies worldwide.
For our IT Service team, the journey has been about meeting organisations where they are. We understand the very real pressures facing service desks today, from rising ticket volumes and stretched teams to increasing expectations from end users.
We've built deep expertise in this space because we genuinely believe that great service, whether internal or external, is a competitive advantage.
And with Agentforce, we’re helping companies take AI beyond pilots and experimentation to accountable, production-ready execution where agents work alongside people in real workflows, with trusted governance, delivering real impact.
What are you looking forward to most at SITS?
SITS is one of the most important events in the IT service management calendar, and we're genuinely excited to be part of it. For us, it's about the conversations – hearing directly from IT leaders and support teams about what's keeping them up at night, what's working, and where they want to go next.
We're also looking forward to showing what Agentforce can do for IT service teams right now. AI is no longer a future aspiration – it's here, it's practical, and it's already transforming how service desks operate. Being able to demonstrate that live, in person, is something we can't wait to do.
Why should visitors come to your stand?
Come and see what AI-powered IT service management actually looks like in action. We'll be running live demos of Agentforce IT Service, showing how it can handle routine IT requests, escalate complex issues intelligently, and free up your team to focus on the work that really matters.
Beyond the demos, you'll get to speak directly with our UKI specialists who work with IT service teams every day. Whether you're exploring a full platform transformation or simply looking for ways to reduce ticket volume and improve response times, we'd love to help you think through what's possible.
Find Salesforce on stand 470 or join them for ‘Reinventing Employee Experience with Humans and AI Agents, Together’ at 11:00 on the 14th May in Theatre 3.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Speaker Q&A: Jenny Hock
On the 13th May, Jenny Hock, VP, Product Management at GoTo will be taking to the stage at SITS for No Longer Science Fiction: Putting AI to Work for SMB Service Desks Today
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Helping IT professionals leverage AI to revolutionise the way they work.
How did you get into the world of AI for IT support?
My background is diverse - I spent 5 years leading advanced fulfilment products at Amazon before joining GoTo/LogMeIn, but I’ve always been drawn to the leading edge. At GoTo, that means using AI to fundamentally change how IT teams operate.
For a service desk team with limited time and budget, what is the one AI use case you would recommend they tackle first, and why?
Record and transcribe your support sessions. It requires zero process change, and the AI-generated summaries and trend insights will immediately show you where to focus - and make the case for doing more.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
Learning from and meeting with customers and other ITSM professionals.
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
Whether it’s in-house or through a solution like LogMeIn Resolve, AI is the answer to move from reactive to proactive IT management.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.
Pink Elephant EMEA achieves ISO 27001 certification
We are proud to announce that Pink Elephant EMEA has achieved ISO 27001 certification, the internationally recognised standard for information security management. This is a milestone we have worked toward as an organisation, and one that reflects the dedication of our entire team. For our clients, this certification provides independent assurance that their data is handled to the highest global standards, covering confidentiality, integrity, and availability across every engagement we deliver.
A company-wide commitment
This accreditation follows the ISO 27001 certification of our Managed Service Excellence Centre in 2024 and completes a company-wide goal we set for ourselves. Security governance and risk management are now independently validated across our entire organisation, covering all four service lines (Training, Consultancy, IT Support, and ITSM Technology) and from our internal operations through to the services we deliver to clients every day.
“Trust is earned, and we are committed to earning it every day. This certification is not a standalone achievement. It is a milestone within our broader commitment to information security, governance, and continuous improvement. It reflects the collective effort of our entire organisation, and it strengthens the foundation on which we support clients through their most complex, security-sensitive transformation journeys.”
– Anton Fourie, Director Africa, Pink Elephant EMEA
What ISO 27001 means for clients
Many of our clients operate in regulated or security-sensitive environments, in government, financial services, healthcare, and large enterprises. We also work with a growing number of mid-market organisations that need the same enterprise-grade security assurance from their partners. This certification gives them the same uncompromising standard of protection.
Security as part of service excellence
At Pink Elephant EMEA, we have always believed that information security is not an add-on to service excellence, it is part of it. ISO 27001 aligns directly with how we work: our governance structures, our risk management practices, and our ITIL-aligned service delivery. We are proud of what this represents, and we look forward to continuing to earn the trust our clients place in us.
Written by Pink Elephant.
Speaker Q&A: Jon North
In less than six weeks Jon North, Area VP, Enterprise Architecture and Partner Enablement at NinjaOne, will be taking to the stage at SITS for How to script at scale so your support staff aren’t bored to tears and you don’t break anything
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?
To put it simply, making people’s lives easier and better.
Our customers, their customers, my colleagues.When I run training sessions, or sessions like I did at SITS last year, I can literally see the lightbulbs going off in people’s heads as they start to understand the implications of what I’m talking about – I had people commenting on my post about last year’s session saying they went back and implemented the ideas I shared, and achieved great success.
My ideas to deploy RMM/endpoint management agents to remote laptops in a Windows domain environment have had a huge impact, with numerous devices deploying at global scale within a couple of hours; my processes and automations for migrating away from other RMM/endpoint management solutions make the transition much quicker, more robust and more scalable, with agents deployed much easier and with less impact and disruption than other models; getting to the “single source of truth” of what Windows Update has been doing makes for far more trustworthy data.
Having a direct impact on the knowledge, skills and career trajectories of colleagues has been incredibly satisfying to see play out.
How did you get into scripting and automation?
I learnt to code when I was 12 and was published by 14, reverse-engineering computer games to allow readers to cheat with infinite lives etc – I was always more interested in how they worked than actually playing them – and I’ve been scripting, automating and simplifying ever since.
During my corporate days I reduced a 22-page document on how to configure a particular application to a three-line Batch file and a registry export. Then when I went vendor-side I had the opportunity to create similar solutions, only now on a much bigger scale (tens of millions) – and I’ve been coding, and teaching coding, ever since.
What's the most painfully repetitive task you've seen a support team still doing manually, and what was the moment you thought "there has to be a better way"?
Repetitive – the first was probably that app config I just mentioned as we had to do it constantly, it took a fair while to work through each time, and was prone to human error. That said, it’s still probably something really mundane and predictable like deleting temporary files – relatively simple to script, but saves SO MUCH time versus doing it manually and interactively on box every time.
“A better way” – the agent deployment model for Windows domains is based on an idea that installs the agent via an automated process that happens on every domain controller every couple of hours or so, rather than the previous model everyone was using (many still do) which tried to install it on system startup before remote laptops had connected, so they’d never get hit. This model hits remote laptops when they next connect – it’s been a game-changer for companies with a lot of remote workers – I first did it at Datto a few years ago where it hit 250k endpoints in the first quarter, and have since completely refactored it for Ninja, which was released the other week. The migration and deployment scripts I’ve written for customers transitioning have been incredibly impactful and made the journey far smoother than it has been historically.
What are you most looking forward to at SITS?
Seeing the lightbulbs go off during my session, and meeting customers at the NinjaOne booth to talk all things endpoint management and automation!
What do you want visitors to take away from your session?
The session is all about things to think about – and watch out for – when you take your scripting to the next level and write code for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of endpoints (or more!). The audience will learn actionable insights they can take away and put into practice straight away when they’re building and testing their code.
SITS - Service Desk & IT Support Show, taking place at Excel London 13-14 May 2026.
For further information, please visit www.servicedeskshow.com.