April 25, 2008 11:33 AM PDT

OTRS, an open-source ticket system worth watching

Posted by Matt Asay

A year or so ago I was looking around for a good ticketing system and came across OTRS. Looking around the ticketing system landscape, it's hard to miss OTRS. There are others, of course, like Request Tracker, but based on the numbers OTRS appears to be the leading ticketing system.

It's an impressive system with an equally impressive list of over 150 paid customers, including Nokia, Siemens, Lufthansa, Boeing, NASA Ames Research Center, Amnesty International, and Fujitsu Microelectronics America. If you believe that technology companies are good bellwethers of smart technology decisions, then OTRS has this in spades (including free use of OTRS by Intel and Sun, as well as GE and the American Stock Exchange, and 6,000 other companies).

Indeed, OTRS sports impressive usage all around:

55,000 installations in 24 languages
4,200 mailinglist subscribers
800 active community members

All of which was done by the community as well as 22 OTRS employees and an additional 20 freelancers. That's the power of open source.

If your company is in the market for a good open-source alternative for a service desk and IT service management system, take a look at OTRS. Please let me know what you think.