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Salt Lake City-based Avocent Corporation has announced an upgrade to its LANDesk (News - Alert) Service Desk IT Business Management Suite, billed as a tool to help companies "increase productivity, improve service quality and reduce IT management costs."

The new version, generally available immediately, continues Avocent's (News - Alert) LANDesk product line strategy of providing service desk and IT service, infrastructure and asset management.

The upgraded LANDesk Service Desk  provides new features such as a Web Desk application and dashboards for more proactive service management. Web Desk allows access to LANDesk Service Desk from any location via an Internet connection -- great for avoiding local installation.

"The latest version of LANDesk Service Desk builds on our Touchpaper (News - Alert) acquisition with service desk technologies customers want," said Steve Workman, vice president, product management, LANDesk, explaining that the LANDesk product line lets organizations "transition the service desk from a cost center to a business services center, improving service processes."

Avocent officials say organizations are looking for tools "that grow with them as they evolve from basic incident management to more long-term IT goals and proactive ITIL service management disciplines, such as problem and change management."

"The ability for us to have even quicker response times through a browser, from anywhere with Web Desk, coupled with the new version's  dashboard, are benefits," says Tom Mortimer, director of computing services, University of Dundee.

It also offers integration with SolarWinds (News - Alert) Orion Network Performance Monitor, a network management product, via new Event Management functionality that allows events occurring on the network to be automatically reported to the service desk.

In May TMC's Vivek Naik reported that Avocent announced that its latest product line of “SwitchView SC Desktop Switches” was awarded a U.S. government and international security validation known as “Evaluation Assurance Level 4+,” by the National Information Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme.