IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs OpenText Service Manager [EOL] comparison

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."

"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution is very easy to work with."

"It's pretty well-structured in modules."

"It gives us better understanding and control of service management."

"Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base."

"The workflow engine that standardizes and globalizes the process steps. It drives people through the process by standardization and automation."

"Service Manager's best features are flexibility and customizability."

"Technical support is pretty good."

"The initial setup is easy."

"A valuable feature for us is that we have an ordered way to handle all the cases that we can handle with the infrastructure."

"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."

"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 reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."

"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 solution lacks a graphical user interface."

"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."

"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."

"Service Manager would be improved with access to automation."

"Their end-user interface and technical support features could be improved."

"It needs to be easier to use for the end users because one problem we had was that we are handling different kinds of cases."

"There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications."

"There's a lot of manual work, which is error prone and time consuming, in how the code gets transported from one system to the other."

"The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky."

"It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good."

"The product's technical support services need improvement."

"The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."

"The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."

"The license is not cheap."

"I pay for Service Manager on a yearly basis, and the price is reasonable - I would rate it five out of ten."

"I would say that identify your requirements and pay for the support to implement and test those requirements, and then hope that you did a good job because the cost of their service is fairly expensive."

"HP Service Manager has moderate pricing."

"Micro Focus Service Manager is a little cheaper than other options. You have to pay a monthly subscription fee."