OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The most valuable feature is the whole compact thing. The ticketing tool has everything in it that we need.

There are some ups and downs. On the upside, we don't need to create any very complicated integrations because it's quite compatible with all the other HPE tools which we need for our end-to-end business. On the downside, it cannot really operate in the cloud; but other than that, everything is good.

It has improved our communication between teams. The distribution of issue solutions, for example, is integrated in one application. I know there are also the databases for the solutions, the known error databases and so on, which all improve the behavior of the company because everybody knows how to solve problems.

I’m not sure what I can suggest to improve. We also got such questions from our customers; and we provided them with our contact in HPE. Not all of those requests are possible to get into the product; so we sometimes end up customizing it. For the moment, I cannot think of anything specific that I would change; but I'm sure there are multiple things that could be upgraded.

It is stable now. We are quite special. In the past, integrations were kind of complicated. We had some ups and more downs. Now that we've switched to the Windows service, it is really reliable. The application's performance reached a completely different level; so it's quite fast. Users are happy about it.

The availability of the application is not comparable to what we had in the past. We had downtime maybe once or twice a month. At the moment, we do not experience anything like that.

Over the last five years, we had a huge project which involved everybody in the company switching over from Peregrine Service Center to HPE Service Manager. That was quite a huge achievement. In the past, we were not very satisfied with it; but after we upgraded the system, everything was okay.

The quality of the support depends on the type of support. We have multiple kinds of support. Either our customers contact our operations teams via service manager to provide support for the storage service, or we have a centralized and localized support directly for the application itself. I fall into the latter type of support.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

I wasn’t really involved with the initial setup. We started with the Service Manager 7.0, the version that was there 5-6 years ago. Then we had the huge upgrade to Service Manager 9.0. It was not that huge because at that time, it was only a small number of people working with it. That was the preparation for the rollout to the whole company.

The upgrade was kind of a complex process. Everything is complex. We are using our own customizations. We are not using the out-of-box stuff. Therefore, each upgrade involves something unexpected.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

The best solution depends on your needs. You should consider different solutions and decide which best fits your needs. Ask yourself whether HPE Service Manager can provide you what it provides us.

It's a complete service management suite; a complete management product used by the company worldwide for us. It's good. It's a full suite of processes under one tool, fully integrated with all the other HPE software products.

From an IT perspective, it improves the way my company functions because it supports all our ITIL processes, all the service management processes; best-in-class processes across the whole IT organization, which is good and important; and all components being connected under the same umbrella.

There are features that are missing and that can be improved in upcoming releases, and HPE is well aware of those. They're working on those. For example, they need to build a new portal for the end users to access, which is a kind of interface between our end users and IT. They're working on that. They need to have a portal that will be mobile friendly and all that stuff. That's coming up with a new version. It would still need improvement, but they're moving in a good direction.

We have used it for many years. With a previous version, more than five years ago, we showed some instability issues, but I know HPE put a lot of investment in the quality of the new products and the latest versions. Now, for the last 2-3 years, we haven’t had any stability issues.

It is highly scalable. We already use it on a kind of cloud architecture with several servers. We have what they call "horizontal scaling" with many servers. When we need to increase the bandwidth, we just need to provision some new VMs. It is easy to add to the cluster; so, extremely easy and scalable.

We rarely use technical support. We used it a few years ago, when we migrated from another HP product called OpenView Service Desk, which was phased out by HP, to a new one, because we had to get used to working with the new product.

For the last couple of years, we have opened very, very few support tickets. It's working fine.

As I mentioned, we were using another HP product (at that time, it was not yet HPE). It was HP OpenView Service Desk. That was their previous service management suite. When HP acquired Peregrine, with Service Center that became Service Manager, actually, they phased out Service Desk. We moved from Service Desk to Service Manager simply because of an HP – at the time, HP – decision.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Service Manager is not a simple product. It's not the kind of stuff where you download the bits, run setup and that's it. There is a lot of tuning and configuration. It's always the same: This product has a lot of configuration and customization capabilities. It's highly flexible, but on the other hand, what you have in flexibility, is also what you find in complexity.

For us, it's not an issue that it's somehow not friendly or easy, as you might imagine, but on the other hand, we can do whatever we want. That's the most important thing.

There wasn’t really a shortlist of vendors because, again, HP came to us proactively, announced the fact that Service Desk will be phased out, and indicated that all our licences, all the features, and even more would be available to us at no cost; that is, except the implementation cost, but we did that in house, so it was kind of an indirect cost. There was no cost in terms of new licences or professional services.

In general, when we’re looking at a vendor like HPE, Dell or IBM, the main criteria is integration. We’re using a lot of HPE products, and because we're using a lot of their products, we expect that we won't have to manage product A talking to product B and to product C. That is their stuff, and they need to manage that for us.

First of all, compare, for sure. We use an HPE product; we still look at other vendors and competitors. We have a long history with HP/HPE. Now, what I would also say is, wait, because in my shop, we know we are a pure customer of this software product. We know it's moving away from HPE going to another company. They say nothing will change. We'll see. I think it brings uncertainty, and they're well aware of that.

If I had a colleague or a friend of mine say to me, "I need a service management solution.", I would say, “We have a nice, wonderful solution.” Now, what it will look like in a couple of years is less clear than what I would have said last year. So, we'll see. Normally, nothing will change, but we just know the name of the new company. We don't know what the leaders will choose, even if right now, the HPE people we see say, "Nothing will change." I think that will be the case for one year, but they can't speak for 2-3 years.

No vendor is perfect. There's always improvement possible, so nobody deserves a perfect rating. Why not a lower rating? I think they're doing a good job, and they listen to customers.

It has features such as integration with Skype for Business, smart analytics, and smart ticketing. It integrates with our current proprietary system. It's provides end users with a single interface for multiple types of communication. This is how it is helping.

As a whole, it helps us to improve and automate workflows to make sure they provide the minimum guaranteed level of service, quality of service, and so on.

It's not the best trouble ticket system. We would like to have Skype for Business integration fail-over with our cluster-based solution. There are other enhancements we are waiting for and we are in touch with HPE support regarding them.

We are looking for a tool that is certified with Gartner. HPE is not the best tool for this. ServiceNow is better. We want to have more features, cloud-based solutions, and more enhancements regarding the digital service system.

Although we have never seen ServiceNow, it's been certified by Gartner, the certifying authority, so they have something that HPE doesn’t. HPE is now the third or fourth choice. It used to be second choice. So they need to be more competitive with the others and come up with better features.

We have not seen much improvement in the analytics reports interface, so that would be welcome.

Stability is quite good.

The solution is widely scalable.

Technical support is average. It takes too much time to resolve issues in relation to the competency of the technical support engineers. Every issue is elevated to the lab level. Maybe we are more competent than the HPE support or they lack knowledge. We do everything we can to identify issues and we pass them to the HPE support engineers. They ask the basic questions and then it takes 2-3 weeks for him to understand the issue. Then they escalate it to the lab and he will say that he is waiting for the lab. This is bad support.

We started 13 years ago with the original HPE Service Desk. Now, it's not an original HPE solution; HPE took over Peregrine Systems. So that’s what we use, for better or worse. But, it's quite customizable.

It's not like we just choose a solution. We follow the HPE roadmap. Whatever they deliver, we end up with it and implement it. There are times when we keep asking for some advanced features and it's a matter of time waiting for new releases. They are not that very agile incorporating the changes. They take a long time.

The setup process is very well documented. It is straightforward.

HPE also has a cloud-based solution called Service Anywhere, but we are not sure how it works. Is the functionality the same and just the platform changed, or is the functionality different in the cloud-based solution? They are also looking at the road map for Remedy. But we would rather they improve HPE Service Manager.

The product is completely integrated for our company, so it simplifies a lot. Also valuable is the ability to customize the tools, and learn to follow our process.

It is not so simple for the company. Basically, we are obliged to have an organization in order to do some development. We have a stronger requirement for our business to follow their process and the other very complex extra processes. For example, for change management, we have a very complex process, also due to all the regulators.

For me, it's a lot to follow. Previously, it was a lot to simplify the IT system. Before implementing HP service management, we had more than 10 different tools. One of the benefits was to simplify our architecture and significantly reduce the cost.

For me, we need integration with big data. I think it will be with the new version. We have to see it to be able to analyze more. In fact, we are able to look at data; but, in the end, we are currently not able to manage it. I think the new version will be much better when we have the view of big data.

It's not so easy to move to the next version. It's not quick to upgrade. It's a significant project for us.

It is becoming more and more stable. We are currently in version 9.43.

It has met our scalability requirements.

Technical support is absolutely very good.

I wasn’t involved at the very beginning of the project, but I was there just after the whole effect. It's not a technical project. It's much more of an enterprise project.

We looked into some competitors, including ServiceNow. One branch of our company bought ServiceNow. We are in an internal competition.

We chose HPE because it's a large company. We are also a business with other lines of business. It was very helpful to know that it was not only useful for that one project.

Keep it simple. Do not do a lot of customization. Keep the implementation of the tool simple.

It is a rich content solution. We use automation services on HPE.

We can use it very quickly. It's a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality.

The support and functionality of the portal could be improved. There was an old portal and they stopped it in the last version. Though there is a new portal, it's not really clear. It's a problem.

Stability has been fine.

We are a company of 3000 employees and we have been able to use it effectively in our company.

We had to take premium support. The standard support is not enough. Premium support is good but you have to pay more.

The integration is a little bit complex.

The user experience was great. The whole project was integration between the old version to a new version. It was better for the users and they agreed to upgrade to the new version.

We looked at ServiceNow and BMC. The reason we chose this tool was because we could not be on SaaS due to security issues. We were already using an HPE solution so it was easier for us to stay consistent.

Another reason was that ServiceNow is SaaS based and Service Manager is not.

We also looked at Service Anywhere but we could not go into a SaaS solution.
Maybe in the future, our next step would be to move to Service Anywhere within HPE.

The most valuable feature of the solution is usability. We use the tool to keep track of our incidents, technical changes and problems. It enables us to address the root cause of incidents. Also, the service request management is also valuable. It addresses all those areas for us and is pretty key for us.

Before we had Service Manager, we had a number of products from other vendors. When we implemented Service Manager, it gave us a standardized, centralized tool which we were able to leverage globally.

The things that I'm waiting for are things like better email integration, mobile-type connectivity, and an improved portal for users. The end-user experience is very key for me. At the moment, that's an area that the product's perhaps a bit weak. In terms of functionality, it does already what I need it to, generally. There are some new areas coming along that are quite exciting. Things like big-data analysis, automation. These are all things that are going to be strong, for the tool in the future. In terms of what I want right now, is a tool that's slick and usable for the end-users. All these extra things are bonus add-ons for me.

I think making it a lot easier for the user to pick up and just go with it. We want something that's more akin to the standard internet experience that users would expect today when they're looking at things like Google and Amazon.com. It's that kind of experience that we want them to move the product towards. We've got some additional add-ons that would be of interest, but they're secondary to getting the user experience right.

The product is quite stable. We're having some issues with performance, but I think it's down to the way we've implemented it rather than something specifically within the tool. It just doesn't respond as quickly as we might expect. It's not that it's terribly slow; it's just that it's not as quick as you'd want it to be. I think that some things are more to do with our implementation, because it's an on-site, on-premise install we have.

It certainly scales. We work with some very large vendors and they use the same software. So it's quite clear that organizations that are larger than us don't have any problems using it.

I personally haven't used the technical support. The team that I work with in conjunction for delivery of the tool use it. It seems to be okay for them.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

Initial setup can be quite complex. One of lessons that we learned is that we configured the tool to make it fit with our processes and the way we wanted to run the processes. I think it's too much work. It's a lesson to be learned that you basically need to adapt your processes to fit with how the tool works, rather than the other way around. We ended up with an overly complex configuration, which causes us pain every time we do an upgrade. We're working now to simplify that environment by removing the customizations and go back to a more out-of-the-box standard tool.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

My main advice is to work with the tool the way it is and don't customize it. I guess that’s one of things we picked up that's very key, to be honest. I guess just determine where your priorities are and start working with whichever module covers them.

I like that you can actually customize it for different customers without any kind of problems. You can write some simple scripts to handle some of the workaround solutions that are not out-of-the-box. Recently, the interface has been changed; they changed all the menus.

We implemened HPE Service Manager for InterTelecom. It improves their company operation by allowing them to open incidents and new requests providing their customers with better, quicker service. They can implement SLAs and other modules that allow them to look over their problems and categorize them. This way they can filter them much easier.

The user interface was not really good, but they improved it a little bit. Last year they released a new version and now it's much better. Speed could be improved also. It depends on your setup, share version, internet connection speed, and database.

Service Manager is stable. We have more than 20 consultants implementing Service Manager and our customer, InterTelecom, has about 100 or so people using it.

Scalability is good. InterTelecom is a medium size company with many subscribers.

We are the biggest HPE partner for virtual solutions and when we open up cases, we get really good support.

InterTelecom was a consultation project. They were using Service Manager with three different incidents. We consolidated and put everything into one incident and implemented some new features.

Initial setup was complex. It took 6 or 7 consultants almost a year to finish the implementation project.

We do not use HPE Service Manager ourselves. We implement it for our customers and they use various other vendors, such as CA IT Service Management.

We suggest to our customers that they use a similar solution to Service Manager even if they use different products. But we do suggest they switch to HPE products. We think it’s worth switching over to HPE. They are a good company.

The most valuable features are using the Big Data analytics and most of its functionalities like Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and so on.

The new feature of the separate dashboard is the most perfect function.

The Survey function that has been added is also a very important feature and all of these features play a vital role.

It manages the end user experience for handling tickets. It helps in managing the events that are found for system environments and the end user experience for utilizing the environment systems.

I need to see more enhancements in the Service Catalog module as it is a very beneficial module and it needs more enterprise development.

The product is stable. We have had no issues.

It is a totally scalable product.

The first level of support is slow and it takes some time to receive support. However, the second level and third level as well as the R&D layer are faster.

Only our sales manager had used a different solution earlier. From our perspective, we always see other tools that compete with HP Service Manager; we never fail with price.

I didn't do the setup myself but from my team’s experience, it was easy to install.

I advise others to use the HP Service Manager because it's a powerful and capable enterprise solution.

The reason for choosing this product is that it is an enterprise tool and HP is a big company that supports its product powerfully. I have started working with it since 2009 and up until now, I have used about 6 versions, i.e., from version 7 to 9.5. Since HP is a big company, it has the ability to keep growing and that is an important factor for selecting this vendor.

The missing factor in this product is that there are some processes that are not mapped to the ITIL V3. Only 11 processes are certified for the ITIL V3; another 5-6 processes are not certified. Thus, it needs more customization and development that applies to the processes in regards to this aspect. In addition to this, the support team takes a long time to reach a solution and we want a faster response.