We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and IFS Cloud Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."
"The solution has been stable."
"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."
"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."
"Individual user profiles that can be configured as templates to minimize data entry."
"The product is quite flexible."
"The main reason for the ERP project was to bring together our fourteen sites, which had until then worked in separate silos."
"We could quickly understand what was going on and what the customer wanted to do."
"What I like about IFS Applications is that it's easier to use and implement than SAP. I also like that the IFS Applications team is more flexible than the SAP team."
"A high level of ERP can be handled in IFS."
"When it comes to financing, the solution has helped us to concentrate finance functions like accounting processes in one system. This includes about 70 internal entities around the world."
"The financial posting controls are quite handy. The user interface is really friendly, highly flexible, and pretty intuitive for end users."
"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."
"Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."
"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."
"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."
"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"The solution needs to improve its documentation and user-friendliness."
"IFS uses Crystal Report mostly, which isn't too user-friendly. Developing reports isn't easy and requires a lot of dev time. Since SAP bought it, Crystal Report has become more complicated to use on IFS. You have a dashboard for reporting that is good, but it's incomplete. Most of our clients use Power BI or some additional tooling for BI."
"We would like to see AI-driven CSI functions built into the tool that would allow us to quickly tie our improvement goals to metrics and activities, so Assyst will suggest the next steps to help us get closer to our goals."
"There are certain digital features that need to be incorporated, such as IOP."
"The user interface can be improved. When you're clicking through the screens, there are some icons or symbols that really need updating and would be more useful and noticeable if they are aesthetically pleasing."
"The integration is a bit complex, and post-implementation support services need to be improved. They have a service center based out of Sri Lanka. The support aspect is good, but the response time is a little slower than we anticipated. In the next release, it would be better if Warehouse Management could be improvised. They have a product line that's a data warehouse management system, but it's still premature and requires a bit of enhancement."
"I'm a business analyst, so I do a lot of customer-facing work. I take calls from businesses I have to troubleshoot. One thing that bugs me is the error messages you get from IFS. If I get an error message, I have to dig to find the cause because, often, the error message doesn't precisely describe the problem. It'll hint about where the problem lies, but you have to work to find the root cause. It doesn't help in my situation. You expect an error message to point to the field or what is causing the issue."
"The solution's initial setup process was complex...The technical support my company receives from the implementation partners of the solution is not that great."
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews while IFS Cloud Platform is ranked 8th in Help Desk Software with 29 reviews. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6, while IFS Cloud Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IFS Cloud Platform writes "Robust, customizable, and modern". IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management, whereas IFS Cloud Platform is most compared with SAP ERP, SAP S/4HANA, Oracle E-Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and IBM Maximo.
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