ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus in 2025: A year in retrospect

As we begin 2026, let’s take a moment to retrospect on the incredible strides we at ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus have made. This was an eventful year for each product in our Unified Service Management (USM) suite—from major releases and analyst recognitions; to impactful AI features and powerful integrations.

As we close the chapter on this year, and set our sights on 2026, here's how AI shaped our ITSM strategy for 2025 at ManageEngine, and some interesting tidbits from our journey.

Here are ServiceDesk Plus’ KPIs from 2025

You may have spent your year looking at your organization’s metrics and KPIs. Let’s take a look at our KPIs and milestones set by the ServiceDesk Plus team and our customers this year:

• Release of 20+ advanced AI capabilities within ServiceDesk Plus.
• 150,000+ successful GenAI invocations executed by our customers.
• 15 million+ data driven predictions delivered by Zia.
• 200,000+ single-touch automations triggered.
• 275 million+ tokens processed via Zia, leading total token consumption, across the ServiceDesk Plus platform amongst the other LLMs supported.
• 325 million+ tokens consumed across LLMs, to utilize our GenAI capabilities.
• Enabled integrations with 95+ applications through Zoho Flow, the integration platform from Zoho.com
• Our biggest GenAI release yet went live, along with native Zia LLM support, and Ask Zia, our conversational LLM style assistant
• Version 15200 was released for the on-premises version of ServiceDesk Plus, featuring Ask Zia, Request Workflows and more!

Unpacking 2025’s major releases

ServiceDesk Plus

Our Q1 releases brought new GenAI and predictive intelligence capabilities to the existing suite of AI features within the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus. Powered by the convergence of predictive ML models and Zia’s AI capabilities, these features enabled:

In Q2, we launched Zia dashboards in the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus—measuring AI adoption trends and token consumption across your ITSM practices, enabling data-driven decisions on how you weave AI into your ITSM workflows. These dashboards are comprehensive and fully customizable; helping IT teams align their business goals with their AI initiatives.

Our Q3 release was the biggest GenAI release yet for the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus. It introduced:

• Zia LLM—powered by open-source foundational models
• Ask Zia—your conversational LLM-style assistant
• Ask Zia Workflow Assist—your personal workflow expert, empowering you to go from blueprints to workflows in seconds;
• Checklist Generator—leverage LLMs to generate your checklists
• Custom Script Generator—creating bespoke template level automations
• Resolution Assist—drafts resolutions from ticket conversations
• Enhanced Solution Generator—generates complete solution articles, with keywords and titles

In Q4, ServiceDesk Plus version 15200 for our on-premises version was released, with some major new features, such as:

• Request Workflows—enables single-touch end-to-end automation of request management
• Ask Zia—the conversational LLM style assistant within ServiceDesk Plus, powered by ChatGPT and MCP tools; appending to the existing AI suite, with powerful features such as Zia Actions, Workflows, and Parser.
• User Defined Actions—enables automations within and across instances, through custom triggers or as nodes within workflows
• Child Requests functionality—enables technicians to create linked tickets, even across instances
• Approval Level Actions—automate approval-bound actions
• Microsoft Teams Message Extension—enables ticket creation, ticket search, and quick create from within message options in the Teams interface
• Advanced ESM Portal Customization through Zoho Canvas—Zoho’s graphic-based UI customization tool, sidestepping the need for HTML scripting
• Advanced Features for Custom Modules—spanning automations and Custom Module Workflows, and enhancements to sub entities, expanding support for even more bespoke process customizations within ServiceDesk Plus.

ServiceDesk Plus MSP

This year, the ServiceDesk Plus MSP team introduced:

• Timesheets: Effectively log technician man hours through custom time sheets, segregating billable and non-billable hours across customer accounts with ease; for the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus MSP
• Billings: Generate bills for your clients accurately based on your technicians' efforts; for the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus MSP
• Integrations to ChatGPT, and EventLog Analyzer for the on-premises version of ServiceDesk Plus MSP
• Integration to Cloud Telephony for the cloud version of ServiceDesk Plus MSP

AssetExplorer

This year, the on-premises version of AssetExplorer underwent a revamp of its CMDB, with a few enhancements, including new CMDB roles, CMDB reports, and increased CI type and additional field counts. Meanwhile, we introduced asset age tracking, asset audit, contract expiry notifications and enhancements to the CMDB in the cloud version of Asset Explorer.

There were new integrations and improvements to the existing ones for the on-premise version of AssetExplorer. The OAuth integration now supports single-sign on for Microsoft AzureAD and Google Workspace and other OAuth 2.0-compatible providers. The integrations with ManageEngine’s UEMS suite are now bidirectional, supporting synchronization of assets, data and users across platforms with ease. The cloud version of Asset Explorer now integrates with SaaS Manager Plus, helping you track software licenses, license agreements, renewal dates and expiry, license amounts and more, from within the Asset Explorer interface.

2025: ManageEngine’s year in the analyst spotlight

We started the year, positioned as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape report for ITSM. This recognition followed a comprehensive study of our platform capabilities, service delivery across ITIL-certified ITSM practices, automation and AI capabilities, as well as our support for governmental standards and regulations.

In September, ManageEngine was recognized in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Artificial Intelligence Applications in IT Service Management. We believe this recognition comes from our global presence and the ability to deliver AI-driven ITSM that’s easy to deploy at no additional cost. Together, these strengths ensure that every persona in the digital enterprise is empowered to attain peak levels of productivity.

In November, ManageEngine was named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management Platforms, Q4 2025. In the report, "Customers generally praised ManageEngine for its flexibility, extensive functionality, and ability to adapt to diverse business needs, such as ticketing, asset management, and workflow creation."

We didn’t stop there. This year, ServiceDesk Plus was PinkVERIFY® certified for three additional processes: Knowledge Management, ServiceDesk, AI; and ITIL® certified for Asset Management. ServiceDesk Plus is now ITIL® certified for 14 practices, and PinkVERIFY® certified for 10 processes, across the breadth and width of your ITSM.

Expanding the ecosystem: Bridging diverse IT needs

This year, we brought down the walls between your ITSM and your diverse suite of IT applications, helping expand ServiceDesk Plus’ integration capabilities. ServiceDesk Plus now supports integrations with over 225 of the most popular IT and business applications.

In May, we rolled out the Zoho Flow integration for ServiceDesk Plus. Zoho Flow is Zoho’s integrated platform as a service (iPaaS) solution, empowering you to orchestrate service delivery workflows at scale, across 95+ applications. This integration allows you to trigger contextual actions or action sequences across applications enabling seamless orchestration of your IT service delivery.

For example: When a user onboarding request is raised, you can set up a node within Request Workflows in ServiceDesk Plus Cloud, to create a user account in Entra ID, provision access to Microsoft Teams, or even add the user to a specific channel; all without manual intervention.

WhatsApp can now be integrated with ServiceDesk Plus Cloud to trigger predefined, automated notifications to your end users across different events in a ticket’s life cycle. These notifications can also be setup as Custom Actions to use them across Triggers, Workflows and Life Cycles.

You can also create communication channels for your different service desk instances through different WhatsApp Business accounts, enabling enterprise wide updates, in the palm of your end user’s hands.

ServiceDesk Plus now integrates with SaaS Manager Plus, ManageEngine’s comprehensive SaaS management application. This integration empowers you to bring SaaS applications and license information into ServiceDesk Plus Cloud, eliminating the need to manage multiple dashboards across your SaaS landscape.

You can also automatically create service desk tickets for expiring SaaS licenses and route them to the appropriate teams for timely review, enabling proactive renewal planning and uninterrupted access to critical applications.

Not just that, we rolled out over 10 Marketplace extensions, helping you setup AI powered functionalities, such as RCA and PIR generation by Zia, and building bridges with apps that we don’t integrate out of the box with, such as Jira and JamF.

Delivering service excellence worldwide: Service without borders

This year, we hosted over 16 user conferences across the world—from London to Las Vegas, Colombia to Centro Caribe, Toronto to Australia, our product experts and C-suite came together to host fireside chats, one-on-one meetings, IT leadership forums, technical workshops and roadmap sessions.

Our ITSM product experts hosted various high level thought leadership and product-centric sessions, centered around AI-driven ITSM, GRC-aligned incident response strategies, compliance success through enterprise change and ITAM strategies and more!

We spent over 100 hours with our customers, hosting more than 90 online product masterclass sessions and over a dozen webinars, helping them deliver the best ROI on their investment, by utilizing ServiceDesk Plus and everything it has to offer, to its full potential. Our support teams helped customers with over 80,000 tickets for ServiceDesk Plus, and 96000 tickets for ServiceDesk Plus Cloud.

Not just that, we hosted over a dozen ServiceDesk Plus workshops for over 1,200 customers. We expanded our partner ecosystem to over 300 partners to help reach our customers with localized support.

Looking ahead into 2026

That concludes our review of 2025. With holistic improvements across the ITSM suite, this year has been focused on AI-driven ITSM, and we’re excited to continue this path forward, towards bringing us collectively closer to achieving IT service excellence. With that, we close the chapter for 2025, and start afresh for the year ahead.