OpsRamp announced today that IT organizations that subscribe to its discovery and monitoring tools will now also receive free access to the company’s AIOps and remote access management service tiers for one year.

Ciaran Byrne, vice president of product for OpsRamp, said the decision to provide free access to additional tiers of service is a direct response to the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. IT teams are under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership of IT at a time when they need remote access management capabilities more than ever, he said.

With so many IT teams now working from home—what may become the new normal—OpsRamp is looking to make it less expensive to transition to a cloud-based platform for managing IT operations, he added.

One of the byproducts of the pandemic, Byrne said, will be to accelerate the rate at which IT teams are automating processes. Many IT leaders are unsure how many members of the IT team they may be able to retain during a downturn. As such, many of them have already begun to aggressively automate many more processes as part of an effort to enable a potentially smaller IT team to remain effective, he said.

The challenge, of course, is that the IT environment itself is increasingly complex to manage. In fact, as IT teams look to deploy cloud-native platforms to make applications more flexible and resilient, the IT environment is likely to become even more complex. In fact, according to a recent OpsRamp survey, as of the start of the economic downturn, 69% of respondents expect their organization to invest more in AIOps.

It’s unclear to what degree the OpsRamp decision to make additional services available for free represents the start of a battle among SaaS IT management platform providers to gain market share. IT teams can expect that, given the current economic climate, these providers will be a lot more willing to negotiate terms and conditions.

Of course, the biggest inhibitor to adopting a SaaS-based platform to manage IT has been inertia within the IT organization. The rate at which organizations now determine whether to migrate to a SaaS-based platform for managing IT will have a significant impact on the degree to which IT vendors will be willing to negotiate. Of course, incumbent providers of IT management platforms deployed in on-premises IT environments are also likely to be more aggressive in response.

Not every IT organization will be able to make a fast transition to the cloud during the economic downturn. However, at a time when the pressure to transition to an opex versus capex financial model for IT increases, one of the easiest places to start making that transition is with the software employed to manage IT systems regardless of where they happen to be located.