Industry Comments
Computer Weekly, May 2010
"Sunrise has delivered at all levels, right from process design to going live and a few months later, helping us implement our change processes, as well as providing us with first class support. This is the kind of project you would always wish for: seamlessly smooth and delivered on time."
The Economist Group, May 2010
"Sunrise, home of the excellent Sostenuto ITSM app, has launched "Iguana", a self-service interface for the aforementioned Sostenuto. Here we are talking original and best. The idea is to enable total customisation on a per user basis for information access and management thereof, WRT Sostenuto ITSM, wherever and whenever. Think ITSM meets Facebook and you're getting the idea. Helpdesk software has most certainly moved on".
Computer Weekly, April 2010
"After carrying out some site visits, talking to partner councils, and seeing various demonstrations, it became apparent that of the products evaluated, Sostenuto was the most cost effective and provided our specified functionality."
Tamworth Borough Council, January 2010
“Sostenuto was an obvious choice for us (NHS Blackburn with Darwen and NHS East Lancashire) because it met all of the requirements for NHS National Service Desk Accreditation.”
Government Technology Oct 09
"Vision Express has significantly improved its service level agreements after implementing [...] the Sostenuto system from supplier Sunrise Software [...]. The system implementation was part of a two-year IT transformation at the company. As a result, the IT department is hitting its SLAs 96 per cent of the time, up from 87 per cent."
CIO UK Sept 2009
"Switching from a disparate regional service using various software packages to a single IT hub built around Sunrise Software's Sostenuto platform has not only enabled subsequent savings to be reinvested in improving service quality but also provided evidence of effectiveness that has been crucial in protecting the department's budget."
Computing, Aug 2009
"Adopting the Sostenuto service management toolkit from Sunrise Software (a winner in last year's Information Age Innovation Awards) allowed UKN Group to implement ready-made lTlL-compliant processes."
Information Age, July 2009
"Led by head of IT Rob Mackmurdie, the 18-strong team [at the RFU] has recently streamlined its operations further with the implementation of the Sostenuto service management solution from Sunrise. By eliminating much of the manual nature of logging, prioritising and allocating calls to the helpdesk, Sostenuto has eased the admin for IT staff, allowing them to fix problems more efficiently and ensure that calls do not fall to the bottom of the priority list."
CIO Magazine, June 2009
"Sunrise's Sostenuto solution was chosen with ISO/IEC 20000 specifically in mind and selected over other service management packages, due to it being highly effective at translating ITIL into good working processes and because it lends itself well to the concept of continuous improvement associated with the standard."
Support World Magazine, May-June 2009
"Old Helpdesk software is, frankly, rubbish, so I relished my latest voyage of discovery with Sunrise Software's Sostenuto ITSM product. I say product, but really it's a platform with an ITSM application sitting on top - in this guise at least. The reality is that companies can no longer deal in 5-10 year fixed business plans; 5-10 minutes is more like it. So how can they expect 10-year old (and then some) technology that was designed around the longer-term planning to actually be of use in 2009, Eco-crisis or not?
Instead, Sostenuto ITSM lets you service-manage in a way that reflects your business model and methodology, rather than forcing you down the path the software developers created with their own vision of how everything from raising alerts to trouble ticketing happens."
Computer Weekly Blog, May 2009
"The Arts Council England has enlisted an IT service management system from Sunrise Software to help keep its tech troubleshooting running smoothly. Being a public sector body, the Council was looking for a cost-effective system as well as one that could be flexible. The Council decided that Sunrise's Sostenuto platform hit the mark."
Silicon.com, April 2009
"Butler Group is impressed with the solution and believes that Sostenuto is well aligned with the requirements of mid-sized UK-based organisations aiming to organise and streamline IT support practices."
Butler Group Technology Audit, August 2008
Other comments
"Sostenuto, a service desk product from Sunrise, impressed CEC because of its interface, its web based architecture and the enthusiasm of the staff to the idea of exporting the product. Sunrise was the only vendor which moved quickly."
Service Talk
"Revised in v2.0, Sunrise has made the product web services-based, so elements such as integrated e-mail have now fully embraced the internet. This, in turn, creates a far more flexible range of deployment options, as well as a single interface for all users and no overhead on the users' PCs.
Until now, helpdesk systems tended to be rigid in format, so the business had to apply itself to the software, rather than the other way round. With Sostenuto, companies can configure the software to fit their business, such as controlling screen navigation via the workflows within the company, creating rules that react to real life events and programmed schedules and lifecycles that model the services within an organisation.
An integrated business rules engine enables Sostenuto to react to events and programme schedules so field updates, operations and notifications can be performed automatically. This flexibility means users can go beyond traditional helpdesk routines and integrate their ITSM firmly within their business."
Computer Weekly
"UK developer Sunrise has rewritten the rule book with its new product, Sostenuto, a pure browser based application. This is not simply a 'web-ised' version of an old product but a completely new concept in IT Service Management."
Computer Weekly
"...it (Sostenuto) is probably the first of the mainstream that could genuinely reflect the broader brief of the Service Desk, but that is not to imply that Sostenuto could only find a home in IT - for wherever service is delivered, there may be a place for Sostenuto."
ITServicesUK.com
"Sostenuto steals a march on its competitors because it is not only specifically built around the ITIL framework but it also offers configurability and a browser-based architecture."
Neil Merritt, Service Delivery Manager, Abacus Financial Services Group
"Flexibility, ability to support change and scale as a company - Sostenuto meets those requirements within ITIL and beyond."
Broadband Testing
"Sunrise are among the upstarts with software far removed from the client/server days that will really come into their element in a distributed environment, very much the space that the IT service desk will have to operate within if it is to succeed."
James West, Editor of Customer Service News
"If you think you know all there is to know about helpdesk - or more accurately ITSM - software, then stand to be corrected. With Sostenuto, Sunrise has rewritten the rulebook"
Steve Broadhead, journalist, Support World
"For many years now it could be argued that the helpdesk market has remained largely static, even predictable. With Sostenuto however, Sunrise is changing the approach of service management software development, while maintaining all of the key features you would expect to find in a helpdesk product. Whereas the common, modular approach is relatively rigid in terms of how it forces you to work in a particular way (and can be expensive to boot), Sostenuto has been developed from the ground up as a framework, as well as a set of ITSM-specific tools. Should you wish to explore the - very extensive - limits of Sostenuto, you will find that your imagination is really the only limit."
Steve Broadhead, journalist, Support World
"The potential complexity of the new world of ITS and the perhaps understandable and unavoidable incompleteness of ITIL as an approach forces software vendors to accept the need for flexibility. A recent survey of companies adopting ITIL showed that only 7.5% implemented process management tools 'out of the box' - the vast majority had to customise the system to reflect the process. Most software tools will allow for the construction of forms and reports, but not all will allow for the creation, design and adjustment of an altogether new process. Some are 'hard-coded to express how the programmer sees the workflow rather than how it works in an individual company and this can hamper true expression of the actual processes. Industry evidence suggests that the tool has to be customised anyway - in that case, it should be one that offers the kind of flexibility that ITS will demand."
Noel Bruton, author of 'How to manage the IT helpdesk'
"There's an intriguing precociousness about Sunrise. Having done quite well with the tidy 'Enterprise' product, they next have the audacity to come up with the simply revolutionary 'Sostenuto'. No, it's just not another helpdesk system, but a Web-based platform for expressing and managing service processes and requisite data anywhere in the corporation. Genuinely integrated service management, anyone?"
Noel Bruton, IT Services Consultant
