Forrester Wave™ recognition, a major release, and agentic AI

Newsletter | December 2025

Zoho ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus-IT service desk software

Warm greetings from the ServiceDesk Plus team,

As we deck the halls and prepare for the festive season, we're back with the final edition of the ServiceDesk Plus Newsletter for 2025.

And yes, we've had quite a lot brewing back home to unpack for you this month. From our latest analyst recognition, to a major update to the on-premises version of ServiceDesk Plus, and how agentic AI is revolutionizing service request management and analytics, let's dive in.

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We're thrilled to announce that ManageEngine has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management Platforms, Q4 2025. The report evaluates 15 top vendors in the ESM market, giving decision-makers a clearer view of how the landscape is evolving and which platforms might meet their unique requirements. Technology leaders can review this report to understand the capabilities ServiceDesk Plus delivers, how we compare in the market, and why “Customers generally praised ManageEngine for its flexibility, extensive functionality, and ability to adapt to diverse business needs…".

Read the report.

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This December, we rolled out ServiceDesk Plus version 15200 (on-premises). This release democratizes powerful workflow automation and accessible customization through:

  • Ask Zia, the conversational AI assistant within ServiceDesk Plus that helps users perform actions and acquire information.
  • Request Workflows to automate request management end-to-end with no-code, prebuilt nodes such as automated notifications, timers, approvals, webhooks, and more!
  • User Defined Actions that enable automations within and across service desk instances.
  • Enhanced end user portal customization to change the look and feel of your self-service portal using Zoho Canvas—Zoho's GUI based portal customization tool that sidesteps the need for HTML scripting.
  • Expanded bespoke automation through enhancements to custom modules.

Learn more.

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Cyber Essentials serves as a solid stepping stone for best-practice cybersecurity standards for businesses in the United Kingdom. Your organization needs to be Cyber Essentials-compliant to be able to bid for government contracts or receive public funding. Compliance with Cyber Essentials could also lead to lower cyber insurance premiums since your business credibly demonstrates cybersecurity controls.

This is where ITSM serves as a good starting point. ITSM practices facilitate better coordination among other IT functions like full-stack observability and identity and access management while accelerating your Cyber Essentials compliance without reinventing the wheel.

ServiceDesk Plus, built on ITIL best practices, can help you check off the right boxes towards achieving Cyber Essentials compliance. From deep visibility into your IT asset estate to maintaining software license compliance and managing access requests, ServiceDesk Plus doubles up as your compliance runway towards Cyber Essentials.

Read the e-book now.

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ITSM as a discipline, has evolved with successive advancements in IT, be it ML or generative AI. With time, major incident management has also kept up pace with these developments.

Proactively resolving major incidents helps companies like retail corporations avoid prolonged downtimes and subsequent revenue loss. When your IT is overloaded with large volumes of logs, metrics, events, and other incident-related data, incident response is hindered. Predictive clustering of incidents solves these challenges to a certain extent, but don't help you accelerate incident response—that's where agentic AI steps in.

AI agents work side by side with your incident responders to speed up recovery, minimize fatigue, and ensure service continuity. Read our latest article on how AI agents are set to transform major incident management at retail IT organizations.

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Similarly to how agentic AI accelerates incident response, an analytics-led application of agentic AI can significantly enhance the efficiency of your wider ITSM strategy. From predicting SLA risks and technician inefficiencies, to proactive prevention of incident surges and asset failure, learn how raw data can be translated, queried and acted upon by the convergence of model context protocols and generative large language models. This combination can efficiently:

  • resolve major bottlenecks in asset management
  • proactively prevent SLA breach
  • optimize technician performance
  • make your incident management predictive

Explore how Analytics Plus, ManageEngine's IT analytics and decision intelligence solution, helps you achieve these goals as a part of your journey towards IT service excellence. Learn more.

This will be the last edition of the ServiceDesk Plus Newsletter for this year. We'll be back with more exciting news next year.

Meanwhile, stay in touch with us on Facebook Twitter Youtube Linkedin

Until next time!

The ServiceDesk Plus team

Contact: hello@servicedeskplus.com

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