Hornbill Systems

Hornbill Systems are a UK-based software company, supplying help desk and IT service management (ITIL) software to commercial and governmental organisations, based mainly around the Supportworks product.

History

Hornbill Systems were founded in April 1995, and released their first version of Supportworks in early 1996. The company has grown since then, reflecting the growth in the Service Desk area, and the change of focus of a Service Desk from being purely IT-focussed to affecting all aspects of an organisation's performance.

Hornbill opened offices in New York in October 2004, and in Dallas, Texas, in January 2008. Hornbill Head Office is currently in Ruislip, London.

Company Name

Hornbill is the name given to a bird of the family Bucerotid, of which about sixty species are known, belonging to numerous genera. The name "Hornbill" was chosen by the company's founding partner, because the Hornbill was the mascot of his home town in Malaysia.

Awards

Hornbill Systems was awarded the award by the Service Desk Institute
(formerly the Help Desk Institute).

ITIL Certification

In 2004 Hornbill was awarded PinkVerify ITIL certification from Pink Elephant, an independent consulting firm specialising in ITIL and PRINCE2.

2008 Olympics

Working with Atos Origin, Supportworks was used as the Problem Management system for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Supportworks

Supportworks, Hornbill's main software product, is based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and implements a number of ITIL processes including Service Desk Management (including and Problem Management), Change Management, Release Management, Configuration Management (including CMDB, Availability Management and Service Level Management.

Non-polling architecture

Traditionally, client/server architecture has disadvantages in traffic congestion - the more simultaneous client requests to a server, the more danger of overloading the server. Supportworks uses a Non-Polling Architecture (NPA) approach, using an application server, sitting between the client(s) and the database server.

This application server acts as an arbitrator, caches commonly accessed data and tracks which data item(s) each client is currently displaying / using. When a data item changes (such as when a new help desk call is received), the application server only notifies the clients that need the information of this change. Similarly, the clients only request from the server the information that has changed. So the clients never poll the server.

This approach is unique amongst help-desk management systems.

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