ServiceNow Reviews

As an integrator, I think that what I like the best about ServiceNow is the flexibility that it gives me as an app writer, or a third party developer who can come in and integrate their services into ServiceNow. I think the flexibility and the ease with which I can do it is the best aspect for me. I think it's the way it's architectured. I think it's a very, very, well architectured platform, and that's the strength of ServiceNow. The platform which they architectured in a way which is very open, which is very customizable, which is very flexible.

Cloud is the way to go, and SaaS is the model that is being adopted. It's cutting edge technology with tons of languages which ServiceNow is coming with, and that's what we use. At least from our perspective, there's a lot of similarity in the ServiceNow platform and our platform. We've tried to integrate with other people but it's been very, very hard because they generally are a very closed system that's very difficult to integrate using their APIs or exposing our APIs. With ServiceNow, it's very easy to do that and with the kind of custom APIs that ServiceNow has, especially in the employee space, I think that's a win-win situation for us to be on ServiceNow to actually target these customers. I think that gives us a tremendous amount of value.

I'm not an expert ServiceNow user, as we've only used it for our integration with them. In fact, I have not really come across something that I would say is a problem because I've worked with other people and it's certainly better than that. There always is scope for improvement, and I think most of it is targeted with their Helsinki release. The UI, the UX, the click and drag options to do certain things, it just adds to the more modern feel on the platform.

Since I work mostly on the application development side and I know they're focusing a lot to bring that up. Still there are a lot of restrictions, what developers like to see in an environment they're developing. Such as: you've made a change, I've made a change, can I compare and merge what the change is since we are both developers? I don't have that, I do see what's going on but I don't see. When I have ten developers, it's kind of a little challenge to see who's written what. So there are commercial grade application tools, and I understand ServiceNow is not an IDE, they're not a platform which was built as an IDE but I think that's one idea that if they enhance where I can actually keep track of who's doing what and can I merge two files, can I discard changes from his file and just keep my file? Those kind of changes would really help.

With those of whom I have spoken to as ServiceNow admins or those who manage ServiceNow for the company, they've found it relatively easy just to manage it and from a stability perspective and from a scalability perspective I think it's stood up really well.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Most of our customers that we go to already have ServiceNow deployed. They have a team that manages it so I don't know how difficult or easy it is for them but they did give us an environment to work on and I think that's where we come in as an integrator with our product on it. If your question is specific to ServiceNow I really wouldn't know whether it's a problem for them to manage it or upgrade it.

There are other commercial products out there, there are home grown systems out there, but they're not architectured to be extensible. They're not architectured to allow people from outside to come in with their offering and say, "I can marry my offering with yours and this is what it looks like". They just don't have that capability so we'd really have to behave like two separate systems even if we offer that service.

First of all, I think you have to really think if ServiceNow is a fit for them. As long as they can define what they're doing and somehow link it to service, because ultimately it's a service. In fact, doing any kind of service then this is the platform to go with because this is a platform that can fit into your business processes rather than trying to change your business processes just to use a platform. The benefit comes from the fact that, are you trying to provide a service and is that service very specific to your organization and does your organization work in a specific way. If it does then this is the platform to go with because now you can tune the platform for your business rather than trying to change your business to somehow use the platform you know. So I would suggest that.

The ease of use, as for us it's sort of like Lego. If somebody wants something, if they want some automation, if they want workflow, etc. It's cool that if you can imagine it you can probably build it fairly easily.

It's very, very cost effective. We're able to replace traditional FTE dollars and spend on ServiceNow at a fraction of the cost. I believe when it was initially implemented there was an immediate reduction of one to two people.

I'd like to have an offline mode. For us, we do a lot of workforce management. We've got a lot of guys out in the field in remote locations. Getting them into the system is good, it's beneficial for us. Good forms and get that data in. If they're out on site, they can't access the system.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I think that's one of the key things with that tool is all of those considerations and problems go away.

It's infinitely scalable, we've had no performance issues.

It can be both straightforward or complex. Probably one of the easiest ones that I've done was Greenfield. They didn't have ServiceNow at the time. They only wanted a project management solution. That's it. That was very, very small, very straightforward. Then I did one for a company in Australia called TXA. They do a lot of the television transmission equipment and it was end to end automating ticket creation based on an event log. A very, very bespoke and complicated event log.

It was very particular as there are a lot of concepts very particular to their business. It was very, very interesting but it was incredibly complex. They wanted as much of hands off and let the system sort it out as possible. Most implementations are fairly similar.

Some advice that I've heard -  get people hands on with it as early as possible. I find a I go through requirements with a user or with a company that they get, and they'll think that it's solid. As soon as they start playing with ServiceNow they realize "hang on, maybe I can get it to do this, I can change this. "The requirements just completely change.

I think it's excellent in all of the ways that software can be. The only negative that I've got is the one that I said before which is half negative, half positive. That it's being developed so quickly.

• Flexibility to do what I need to do. 
• The ability to automate what processes need to be automated. 
• Makes it easier for my users to be able to do things. 
• By coding you can go in and change it to whatever you want to do. You make it yours. Whereas, I've used some systems that you get it and that's it.

It gives our users the ability to do things they weren't doing before. We can get rid of several other systems, replace it with ServiceNow. I don't know exact dollar amounts for what they replaced with ServiceNow, but it's more than what I make.

Some of the issues that my team has run into are that something one day works completely fine, the next day it does not. If we release a patch, something happens, and it was working fine now. No recollection in any documentation anywhere about changing, but it doesn't work now. It's always something ServiceNow has changed, but neglected to tell anybody of the change. There's a lot of processes that were working when ServiceNow was implemented but aren't really as beneficial now.

I've been using for four years, and are currently on Fuji Patch 10 in the process of upgrading to Patch 12. Then we're looking at two different things right now. We may go to Geneva, but there's also talk of completely redoing ServiceNow and going straight to Helsinki. We might just redo the entire instance, skip Geneva and start with Helsinki.

There were no issues with the deployment.

Every clone release has been pretty seamless. We had one issue with one patch, but that was due to IE issues. It wasn't compatible before IE9 and some of our users were still on IE8, though they weren't supposed to be.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

The last thing I used before ServiceNow was HPE Service Desk and Remedy. Those are the only two other ones I've really used. I've seen other ones demoed and stuff, but they were not as flexible. I guess I've used SAP too.

I currently go to school too, which is at NKU in northern Kentucky and they use a SAP type product. I can't remember what it's called, but it's just not very functional.

I was not part of my current company's implementation, but with a previous one and their parent company, I was part of their implementations and it was pretty seamless, other than political issues.

Try to do as much as you can out of the box. Use as much out of box parts of it as you can. Development does come in handy, makes it scalable, and makes it more usable, but use as much out of the box as you can. That's the best advice I can give you.

The best thing is that when you patch and something's working one day, you patch and it's not working the next after you've tested and tested and tested and it's not working. Also, there's the fact that there are things that are changed that people are not notified about.

The most valuable features at this point in time for me is the ability for tracking changes, for tying changes in the problem tickets together, tying incidents together to the problem tickets. The interaction between our user to IT aspect, from top to bottom, has been fantastic. Whereas users submits a problem because they have a problem, then we've got to find out if it's a bigger problem, or if it's bug, or SDLC, all this stuff. For me in my role at this point in time, which is changing, it's just tracking everything from bottom to top. We're making sure that stuff is getting done and then communicating back to teams, and it's a full loop.

ServiceNow was implemented over seven years ago. When I came on it was already implemented and I didn't have much of a role in getting ServiceNow changed, add-ins, whatever. They weren't reaching out to other companies. I was basically brought in to do monitoring buildouts, and get our very baseline infrastructure more organized.

I actually don't know. To be perfectly honest, I feel that just about any tool, as long as they have the same offerings, can be modified to fit the company that is attempting to use it. Take a look at an ERP solution. ERP has been around for a lot longer, to a certain degree than say ServiceNow and there is a massive amount of offerings. You can go with SAP. You can go with Oracle. I can't even remember the other guys' names. No matter what, you can always make them work for your company.

They may not have been the best choice for you, maybe there are pluses and minuses. Once you actually get into the application, you start figuring it out at that point it's like, "Well, it would have been better if we went with this, if we focus more on this." The thing is once you get an offering, you still have the ability to go in and configure it to your heart's desire. ServiceNow, it's the full suite of offerings. You have a lot more to sit in and actually go in and configure, as opposed to it's just another ITIL based application that I can sit in and configure.

I know there are places that they can do better at. While I'm not an administrator, I'm not sitting there configuring it, I know our person who does configure it does have his foibles. There are certain things that are difficult to get out of ServiceNow, which is why I suggested going to partner companies that are using ServiceNow already in your similar environment. You go to ServiceNow and say, "Hey. This is what we want to do. How can we accomplish this?" ServiceNow says, "You can do it any way you want."

It's like, "That's not an answer." It's like, "What should we do? We need guidance." Well, "No. you can do anything with it." Okay. That doesn't quite help me as a user, and future administrator, or as an executive. I'm sure it sounds great for an executive, but when it comes down to it, when it starts growing in your own environment, executives starts asking questions, "Why hasn't it been doing this?" It's like, "We don't know how to get that matured within our own environment." It really comes down to I think they can improve upon. They are doing that here with the networking, but for as themselves, have their own best practices to a certain degree.

To a degree, yes it's stable, but mostly it's due to data center issues on their side, or it's come down to network issues on our side. Since it's external, it's not internal, you're looking at having to deal with Internet weather, or data center hosted environments, or our instance had the issues, which is pretty rare.

It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. I think mostly they had a roll back of, not a build or an update. It was some type of data change, but I don't recall the details as it was several years ago.

I wouldn't know because I don't actually handle any of that aspect. Again, I'm still pretty new to actually having my hand in helping with ServiceNow. I don't have any of the hands-on experience. I'm more of a user at this point than an administrator of certain degrees.

I've used many other types of applications such as HEAT, or Remedy, any of those guys and a couple others that I can't remember the name of. They're all customizable to a point. Obviously, not many of those previous ones actually had a full ITIL buildout, or full offering as ServiceNow does. From my point of view and my aspect, I'm more concerned about user experience, and more concerned about backend experience as an IT professional coming in and trying to fix issues, and track said issues. ServiceNow has a much bigger offering in the sense that you've got new changes. You've got your problem ticket findings. You've got tracking for CIs, and the CMDB database, and sitting on the backend trying to provide all that data for those tickets, and whatnot, throughout the company. It makes it a lot easier. It's definitely a one-stop shop for being able to actually come in and help your users, but also help your full infrastructure, your backend.

From what I've heard, and all I can go off of is hearsay, it was pretty easy comparatively. I don't know what they were using before for any ticket tracking system, but that's initially what they jumped into was ticket tracking. We needed something to be able to support our IT infrastructure and our service desk. They also wanted to be able to track changes, and do that. It was just like, "Okay, we'll start with this, and start growing more and more." It turned into quite a bit more. We have definitely stepped up using a lot more of the offerings that ServiceNow has, mostly because we have to, to some degree, to be able to make things a lot more efficient. It's worked for us from what I can tell.

You want to sit there and plan. You probably don't want to turn everything on right from the get go either, because then you're just going to overload yourself. The same goes with any type of a larger offering that has hooks into other aspects of your infrastructure. If you turn everything on, you're just going to get overwhelmed, and not actually have proper resources to be able to handle those. It's always start turning things on, start figuring out what the workflow is, and go from there.

Make sure you flesh out what you're doing. Honestly, I see all the pitfalls are the ones where you'll have a misunderstanding, or make a bad choice in configuration. If you believe that the offering is going to work for you, then you need to make sure you reach out to people who are going through similar situations, or rather it's three years in advance in your same situation. Find another partner company that has already gone through the preliminary, but not too far in the future because then you just look and say, "Wow. They completed so much. How are we ever going to get there?" A year or two, maybe three, and talk with them, figure out what their pitfalls were, a similar type company hopefully.

• Change
• Incident
• Service Catalog
• Configuration Management
• Project Portfolio Management
• Knowledge Base

• Improved the globalization of processes and around the clock service delivery to our customers
• Automated repetitive tasks and shifted left simple tasks to the service desk

• Lots of customizations can lead to breaking the system when moving to another release. This should be managed better by ServiceNow
• UI can be busy and complicated for non-IT users
• Difficulty in debugging and testing code output

I've used it for five years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10

8/10

We used a different product, and switched because it was easier to set up and customize to the needs of our business compared to its competition.

A bit of both. It involved more customizations/work than we initially assumed.

Both. Have a dedicated resource(s) from in house that works with the vendor in developing and setting ServiceNow Modules/Applications. It's very important to use an experienced vendor team that has dealt with complexities in implementing a ServiceNow environment. You should also have clear functional requirements/functional specifications from the beginning before any ServiceNow development is done.

For me, the most valuable feature is the flexibility it allows in customization. We're able to set it with the parameters we need for our specific business use cases.

We're now able to use emails in the Request Fulfillment process, instead of assigning roles to an account.

The setup wasn't as straightforward or easy as it should have been. While it wasn't difficult or complex, there was some planning and work involved.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There were no issues with the stability.

There were no issues with the scalability.

I'd rate their customer service an 8 out of 10.

I'd rate their technical support an 8 out of 10.

I am also working with CA SDM and in the process of comparing the pros and cons of each.

The initial setup was of medium difficulty. Though it wasn't the most difficult setup, it could have been easier.

I didn't participate in the implementation as it was done by a vendor.

Based on my experiences so far, I'd recommend it.

The core applications are what our business uses day-to-day, including incident, change, problem, service catalogue and knowledge. However, I think the real value comes in when you start using CMDB, discovery, asset management and orchestration. Also, the fact that you can build custom apps and there are additional apps for HR, Facilities, etc. is also what makes this tool great.

It has given us a single source of record across all departments. Also, it has allowed us to automate many processes along with enforcing processes by making them workflow driven.

My only thought is while it is great they are expanding into many different areas of business, don’t forget about the core of this product and why it was originally built. UI and feature enhancements to records like incidents would be great.

I have been working with the release from June 2011 – Geneva.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With scalability, we have grown quite significantly in the last two years and the performance of our instance has really taken a hit. However, ServiceNow support has been great and we are currently in the process of moving to a new data center and on to faster hardware to improve this issue.

This can be very hit and miss, there are some individuals who are fantastic and a lot of help and then there are others that are not so much. My biggest struggle is with them just not reading my updates and asking the same questions just to put the ball back in your court even though it is likely you already provided them the information. I will say it has gotten a lot better over the years.

If you aren't very familiar with ServiceNow, I would recommend bringing in a vendor for deployment. They will help you understand the tool and make sure you aren’t boxing yourself in with the way things are built out. The OOB processes ServiceNow offers are all based on ITIL standards so theoretically there aren't a lot of customizations you should need to make up front.

I have worked for a company who used a vendor and did it themselves and now I do it for customers. My biggest piece of advice is don’t just try to make ServiceNow do what your old tool did. Take advantage of the power behind this tool!

This isn’t the cheapest solution out there, but is definitely worth it if implemented and used correctly.

I haven’t necessarily used or evaluated other systems, but I have done work with integrating to other solutions and converting users from other solutions to ServiceNow. I will say ServiceNow makes most of these tools like TrackIt or OmniTracker as a few examples look like they are about 20 years behind the game. The biggest struggle is trying to get users to look at ServiceNow and use the tool to really improve their processes instead of just trying to copy the process you used in their old system.

There are a ton of features and capabilities that can be used to automate processes within your organization and have a single source of data and this is an exceptional tool for that. There is always room for improvement and as they try to expand into different markets ,I do think some of the older applications get left behind and aren’t maintained as they should be.

ServiceNow is a great tool and I would highly recommend it. It will give you powerful automation capabilities and can significantly decrease time users have to spend researching and working tickets not matter what department it is.

• Workflows
• Automation
• Integrations

I would say one of the best things on ServiceNow platform is the way how you can quickly automate delivery of services or goods to the end-user.

Reporting capabilities could use some improvement.

I've used it for four years.

It strongly depends on customer awareness of ServiceNow best practices. In some cases stability is an issue.

It strongly depends on customer awareness of ServiceNow best practices. In some cases scalability is an issue.

Depends how big account the customer is for ServiceNow.

I have a few experiences with HPSD. Thick client instead of web application says everything.

ServiceNow comes with a lot of functionality included as baseline implementation. For example, all main ITIL processes are implemented, as well the fact that it is a cloud solution gives you the whole functional system at the beginning.

I am part of vendor team or advising clients in solution architecture area.

The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want without additional costs.

A strong architect is needed. You should follow best practices and challenge customers. So don’t implement everything right at the moment when you receive requirements.

Find a strong partner with experience of other customers of the same size and nature. Find a parter that will create, together with you, a strategy that will guide you during preparation, all phases of development, and operational times.