ServiceNow Reviews

I have two primary uses of ServiceNow:

1. As our ITSM Platform for providing Application Managed Services (AMS) to Enterprise clients who have solutions on Oracle, Workday, Coupa, and ServiceNow.  NOTE: Other groups within my firm also use ServiceNow to provide IT Service Management to clients on Microsoft, SalesForce, and other major vendors.  We have multiple production instances for delivering Service Desk support to various client install bases, including this one for my above mentioned AMS business.

2. As the ITSM platform for our internal, global support framework. This is a separate instance of the one I use for my UK clients and is 'owned' by our US member firm. Said US firm uses this instance to support not only our internal global Management Consulting business but also to provide AMS to US-based external clients.

ServiceNow has enabled us to rapidly deploy Application Managed Services for new clients, with the ability to configure, extend, and tailor our ITSM Platform to meet individual client needs. ServiceNow's multi-instance model helps enable that flexibility. For example, we recently took on a new Workday client by modifying our ServiceNow instance (configurations and workflows) within 5 months, with successful go-live afterward.

ServiceNow has also enabled our Management Consulting business to provide Digital Transformation services for our clients the world over, as we use the platform as an accelerator for doing IT Target Operating Model transformations.

ServiceNow's Customer Service Management (CSM) Pro & DevOps modules in particular - including ServiceNow's strong interface APIs (to Jira in particular in my case) - have allowed us to:

1. Automate some of the more menial tasks while accounting for our need to develop 

2. Deploy a lot of new features and functionality that get continuously and rapidly introduced by the major vendors via their regular upgrades (e.g. Oracle 4 times per year, Coupa 3 times per year, Workday 2 times per year, etc.).

There are no outstanding gaps or deficiencies that I face at the moment for my business or operational needs. That said, I am interested to see the firm's strategic plans for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), and how the particular areas it will expand on from its existing investments (that feature, for example, in its ITSM Pro and CSM Pro modules). Our AMS business will benefit from further automation of the more mundane tasks as we continue to develop the platform's configurations - including the streamlining / automation of our change control workflow for faster deployment (critical when tackling the very frequent upgrade cadences of Oracle, Workday, Coupa, etc.).

4 years

Very stable so far. I have yet to experience an outage of any of the ServiceNow instances my operations/teams use.

Scalability is good on the production side. It could be better performance on some of our lower environments, notably UAT for our global support estate - although I suspect that is partly down to how our Dev team manage their workloads and the access set up they have (too many users floating in/out?). I have not called for an audit however, so my view here is not qualified.

Minimal need for support - from my personal vantage point - and for the few times we have needed support, the turnaround time and quality of support has been good.  No complaints.

We used Jira initially for our internal Help Desk platform, but it fell far short of needs for the underlying service management workflows we employed.

I entered into already established estates, so was not exposed to the efforts in setting up the ServiceNow instance sets.

All has been in-house. We have full capabilities, as we do service implementations of ServiceNow for our clients and have invested in having internal development and support skills/capabilities.

We moved directly to ServiceNow for two reasons:

1. It was already the production ITSM platform for our US member firm who was given the (internal) contract to support our global management consulting business; and

2. We knew from our multi-year use of ServiceNow for (a) delivering IT Target Operating Model digital transformations to clients AND (b) delivering our Application Managed Services to external clients that this solution would easily meet our ITSM requirements.

I use ServiceNow for incident management, problem management, change management, and request management.

I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful.

I find some features are difficult to use. For example, the creation of service catalog forms. Creating service catalog forms could be made easier.

In the next release, I would like to see some of the features and processes made to be simpler to use. For example, creating the service catalog forms, doing the CMDB, and integration with other systems have to be made easier to use.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It's a stable product.

This solution is scalable.

In our company, we have approximately 1,000 users. For me, I use it every day.

I rarely engage with technical support. I had a good experience with the one or two tickets that were submitted. They were able to resolve the issues and it was a positive experience.

Previously, I was using Jira. 

Jira is meant for small enterprises and it is much cheaper than ServiceNow. 

ServiceNow is meant for a much larger user base.

I was not a part of the initial setup. By the time I arrived, it had already been set up by someone else.

We have five to eight people with various tasks to maintain this solution.

I believe that they had an integrator to help them set up. That was in 2018. before I joined the company.

The licenses are expensive.

They pay a license fee per user. Jira is much cheaper than ServiceNow.

If I was in a small company with 500 users or less, I would use Jira. If I am in a company with 500 or more users then I would use ServiceNow.

For anyone who wants to start using ServiceNow, they need to ensure that they have the funds to finance it. The licenses are not cheap and they need to have a consultant that can help them to customize the functions or the features they need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use cases are for service management, incident, change, problem, asset, and lifecycle. The system was build and integrated to SAP as a backend ERP?CRM system. This made integrations and choices in functionality complicated. However, by replacing Symphony as a rather internal orientated system, ServiceNow gave us the benefit of tight customer integrations by means of the web-based portal, which is a user-friendly interface to use and actually helps speeding up incident handling by improved communication and information sharing.

It gave us professionalized, faster incident turn around times. Improved quality of information shared with our customers. Over time we build an extensive knowledge base that assists in both self-service as in services provided by the servicedesk when handling incidents.

Because we first redesigned our internal and external processes we were able to effectively roll out and implement ServiceNow, sequentially per workflow, and put the lessons learned in earlier implementations to work for us. Overall is has improved service management on CSM.

There is one platform and many solutions. Workflows are well designed and robust. All user screens have the same look and feel, helping to understand the logic of the supported workflows. Integrations to third parties are strong and build on on off the shelve API integrations which makes them quite easy to build. ServiceNow is built on the best practice framework ITIL and helps customers organize their organizations accordingly. Although many trainings need to be completed, this assures a proper knowledge level at the users.

There should be fewer clicks and faster integrations between solutions. Too much information needs to be entered when transferring between solutions. Obvious logic does not always seem to apply when transferring tasks between workflows. Having said this, the availability of these many workflows and solutions on one platform is the strength of ServiceNow. 

New development of new features is not as flexible as one would expect, global adherence to rules and regelations seem to bog down the development and release process.

I have been using ServiceNow for six years. 

It is very stable.

We haven't met the limitations.

Their support is not experienced. 

We did use Symphony which was very internal oriented and needed a step towards our customers. Servicenow provided us the possibility to interface with numerous different customers in different countries as well as third parties. 

The setup was complex due to country dependencies and integrations.

We deployed in-house.

Licensing model ServiceNow is expensive, so monitor actual use.

Yes, TOPdesk and BMC

make sure you prepare your processes and workflow before implementation, choices made at the implementation stage are carried over into your actual work. The tool basically support all imaginable workflows, although this requires a high level of knowledge, customisation and  coding.

We mostly use ServiceNow for incident management. There is a team which interacts with the customers and logs customer issues as incidents. Then those incidents are taken care of by my team. I work on the escalation side of that team.

That is one aspect of ServiceNow. The second thing we use it for are any economic, long-term or repetitive problems. We log problem tickets which are resolved in ServiceNow.

The third use is for changes in the system. All the changes to the system are logged in ServiceNow with their associated tasks. Those are the three major use cases for ServiceNow.

The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks. For example, if there is a chain which requires different steps of execution validation or execution steps, those task divisions, as well as the assignment and ownership of the tasks, is something that is really useful in ServiceNow.

The major area for improvement for our needs would be monitoring the metrics of the times to acknowledge and resolve issues and escalations. For example, if there is an incident which is not acknowledged within a certain period of time, or the resolution of the incident exceeds a certain period of time, it can be escalated to the next levels. That is one of the things you're looking for which is not available with ServiceNow.

The second feature I would be looking for is integration with different tools, like Bugzilla, Microsoft Informer, and Jira. Jira has integration, in fact. Teams in different organizations use different tools, so integrating those tools would be really helpful.

I have been using ServiceNow for two years.

It is quite a stable solution. In the last couple of years we probably had around one or two outages and only one major outage. So it's very stable.

ServiceNow is quite scalable. 

I would say there are about 400 people using ServiceNow in the organization. That includes administrators, users and those who maintain ServiceNow. Currently, ServiceNow gets daily usage.

I don't usually get in touch with support directly because I am not an end user.

In my previous company we used a custom-built tool which was not available on the market. It was called My Article Support and was built internally specifically for big biotic collection. It was highly customized and it catered to a lot of our needs.

One of the features in that tool was based on the customer engagement level and not on the revenue impact that customer had on the organization or the number of users impacted, etc... It would generate the incident prioritization score, which determined how quickly we were supposed to work on the incident. So the prioritization of incidents was automated, which I do not find in ServiceNow. But that tool was very customized and it was internally built so the development was done in-house. The second thing was the ability to track and close escalations because it was a custom-built tool and there was a process for it. The process was defined and was in the documentation.

I was actually not there when the setup was done so I can't answer that.

You need to find a tool that suits your needs. For example, the ServiceNow tool has certain advantages but at this point, one of the major things I'm looking for is tracking an escalation based on acknowledging the resolution. Meaning, I'm looking for something which is different compared to ServiceNow. It probably depends on your needs but for certain use cases, it does work very well, and maybe you need to do a deep dive or evaluate it before you buy anything.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate ServiceNow a seven.

We run thousands of automations.

The reason that ServiceNow is as good as it is, and opposed to Remedy, Cherwell, and HP OpenView, is that ServiceNow was the first IT service management platform or enterprise.

ServiceNow was the first true enterprise to service management platform. They were the first to understand that a request is a request and service is service.

ServiceNow goes back internationally a long time ago when they were Fuji. ServiceNow releases are alphabetical. My experience started with Fuji, and they are on the Orlando release now. Even back then, they were able to put any process into ServiceNow, even if it wasn't and IT process, and have it managed through the platform.

Security needs some improvement. The governance, security incident management, cloud management, and the security module are getting better.

Service mapping could be less complicated. The configuration, and running it appropriately, but that's a difficult thing to do overall.

It needs to be more cost-effective because it can be pricey. 

I would love to see ServiceNow create a solid mid-market entry point for it. They tried it in the past and it failed. That was ServiceNow Express.

I have been using ServiceNow for over a decade.

ServiceNow is incredibly stable.

This solution is scalable to a point. Once you get as large as the Department of Veterans Affairs you will have some issues, but it scalable.

We have 3000 people here in our company. Anyone who is in IT is using ServiceNow.

I haven't contacted technical support. 

If you are as close to out-of-the-box as you need to be then you won't have any issues at all with ServiceNow.

ServiceNow is the least complex of all of the platforms available.

When I worked at the bank they went from zero to running it within three months. At that time when dealing with Remedy or other legacy systems, that was unheard of to go from nothing to running in three months.

With one of our customers, we had it up and running in one month.

We have seven members to maintain ServiceNow. They are developers, senior developers, and the head of service management.

The mandatory minimum is US$ 20,000 for licensing. They have a three-year cycle. I am not sure if it works out to be $60,000 for three years or if it's $20,000 for the three years. 

It's mainly for licensing. The more that you use it and the more it goes to other areas in your organization, the more licensing you will have to pay.

There may be some who look at this and use it for the HR service delivery or they could use another HR application that looks cheaper, but they will be missing the point of having all of the information on a single platform.

I manage an automation orchestration team. The focus of my team is external, not internal. The company uses ServiceNow. We are one of the largest and older consumers of ServiceNow. The members of my team have ServiceNow practice, infrastructure automation practice, could management platforms, containers practice, and DevOps. 

Our team is focused on helping other organizations adopt and adapt to ServiceNow.

ServiceNow is in the cloud, it's basically remedy in the cloud. ServiceNow doesn't get deployed unless you are a Federal Agency because they have their own data centers. ServiceNow only allows Federal Agencies to have their own instant data Center.

Make sure that you are big enough to afford it. If you have a small IT department, then ServiceNow is not for you. The problem is that you won't be able to afford it. You must be a mature enough and a large enough IT organization to start using it.

It doesn't just do IT things, it does more than that.

Make sure that you configure and not customize.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for Service Management in banking branches.

The main improvement is the integration of several business processes.

The most valuable feature is that this is a Cloud solution.

The MGM version is easier to use.

Transparency in the pricing model needs to be improved.

This solution is our help desk system.

This solution is a single-storage for our user community to submit help desk tickets.

I do not like the user interface.

I would like to see a more streamlined process to assign tickets to support people.

This solution seems stable.

I think that it is scalable, although I think that there is room for improvement.

I thought that the initial setup was complex.

I didn't like the design that was given to us and we had very little say on how we could customize it.

We implemented the solution in-house.

My overall impression is that this solution is slightly above-average. My advice is to make sure that this product meets your needs before you buy it.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

One stop shop: All requests for support, new items, changes and anything else can be done in the portal, flexibility of service. Requests can be done directly from the portal.

• Your selected platform, for managing and consolidate ITIL Processes, HR, PPM, CSM, and any new enterprise app you want to build on the platform.
• Set of pre-built ITIL processes as well as a platform that can be used to build a variety of custom business applications.
• The process flexibility - it's very easy to customize and build off of.
• Easy to integrate with third-party applications.
• Customized Dashboard as per user requirement.

It's missing monitoring capabilities.

Stability is assured by the vendor. No issues found so far.

Easily scalable as the vendor assumes availability at all times.

Quick, friendly, and efficiently responsive customer support.

Compared to other ITSM platforms, ServiceNow is by far the most agile, robust, and scalable platform.

It was very straightforward and to the point, since it's very intuitive and easy to deploy.

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

Integrations: ServiceNow is an open platform that come with out of the box integrations API, but if you really want a deep business process integrations of ServiceNow with JIRA, Salesforce, Microfocus, BMC and others, we recommend https://www.zigiwave.com  read more in the blog post here: https://zigiwave.com/how-to-integrate-jira-servicenow-in-less-than-2-minutes/

We use it for ITSM and ITBM.

The area where we have benefited a lot is that, initially, it was very difficult to have end-to-end visibility into what was happening. We didn't have any kind of top-down or bottom-up approach to CMDB and ITSM processes across it. We were able to establish that with ServiceNow. Our other ITSM models are pretty dependent on CMDB elements, so that gives an overall picture of what is happening and where it is happening.

• Request module
• Orchestration
• The PPM Module is pretty important in our organization

The workflow is something we use on a day-to-day basis. It's pretty handy the way it is in ServiceNow. 

As our ServiceNow implementation focuses on Healthcare domain which is highly regulated , Hence we are unable to follow the full agile way to develop/implement application enhancement or new requirements , Hence we follow a hybrid delivery model where  we have integrated following servicenow modules Demand-Requirement-agile Developement- Test Management -Defect Management- Change Managementto bring our releases/changes in a regular basis , enables us to practice CIP & also helps us in having an end to end tracebility.

Also, in the Service Portal, use of Angular JS gives a very good look & feel & a lot can be done with OOB widgets - By modifying existing widget which is pretty simple, We can leverage a lot on top of it. 

Finally, I also like the architecture for collaborating between business logic and client interaction on our client interfaces.

For healthcare, which is a pretty audited environment, there are no concrete solutions for digital signatures, apart from our license with Adobe, so it requires orchestration. That is one area for improvement.

Apart from that, initially, we struggled with financial forecasting and financial management in the PPM module. That needs improvement along with the IntegrationHub which came out in a recent release. It's still in its initial stages. That could grow into a more solid solution that could be more helpful.

It's pretty much a stable product.

It has good scalability.

There is a version upgrade every year, which ServiceNnow pushes, so it remains pretty scalable if you remain pretty close to out-of-the-box. It becomes less scalable if you go in a direction where you want to use ServiceNow as the platform and build your own solution with complex logic behind it. Then, that's an issue.

I would rate the support they provide us, at above three out of five. If they do not come up with a solution or our request is out of the scope of their support, they do help us with a direction for how to get it done.

To start with, we wanted a global planning platform for all our ITSM activity, throughout the business, for internal IT. That's the reason we started migrating ITSM from different groups to ServiceNow. We did some homework on that, such as what was the market position of ServiceNow and how we could integrate with other third-party applications. After doing that analysis we came up with the ServiceNow as our option.

The setup, on a technical basis, was not that difficult. But if I want to involve different businesses into using change management, it becomes a challenge to understand the process and implement it on a platform which is standard for everyone. So it's not really the technical aspect, it's more the procedural aspect.

It took us about eight months to roll out ITSM. But after that, we have had other instances where we use a custom solution, out-of-scope applications for our customer service area, and we were able to implement it within three months.

Initially, the deployment was done by a solution partner and, to be honest, they came up with some functions that activated a lot of things which were not needed. But at that moment, it was very necessary for us to quickly jump into the ITSM module and make it available for everyone.

Later on, we realized that there were many things implemented which were not needed. Many approaches were customized but were not required. For example, Incidents is the table where we are currently doing requests, and that was introduced by the solution partner. But when we involved request-management with Incidents, we somehow missed out on a lot of process automation. There is a powerful workflow with this solution and you can do a lot of process automation, depending on different services. 

We looked at 

• BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow
• Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow
• JIRA vs ServiceNow
• and Cherwell vs ServiceNow.

You can get the most out of ServiceNow if you align your processes more towards the out-of-the-box solution, and not over-customize it to create a solution.

We have 3,000 users hosted on it but not everyone has write-access to the system. There are users who are end users who get Portal access to manage their tasks. Apart from that, there are a few fulfillers who are using the write-access: the support staff, such as the change manager or change coordinator. And then we have admins.

In terms of extent of use, currently, we have more than one instance of ServiceNow. We have three different instances for three different areas, and they have their own sets of uses.

Maintenance is mostly outsourced to a vendor who provides elemental and entry support. We are keeping more of the architectural and solution-designing work in-house.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. It could be a ten if we had a more central way of connecting ServiceNow with different systems. They have taken initiative with the IntegrationHub and I'm really looking forward to that. Also, virtual assistance is something that has started, but we have so many requirements regarding intelligent agents being integrated with it. I'm looking forward to that. If ServiceNow rolled those solutions into it, it would enhance our end-user experience and I could probably rate it a ten.

We are consultants. We use ServiceNow to develop ideas and solutions for our customers.

It has definitely improved operations at the customer end. There are some key metrics which users have wanted and they are able to achieve them through ServiceNow solutions.

The main feature would be ITSM, as ServiceNow initially started with ITSM software. That is something which is important for all our customers. HR Case Management and Customer Service Management are two of the key areas which clients are also using.

HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module.

The stability is really good. As I mentioned earlier, the HR area has a lot of room for improvement in terms of stability. We are trying to customize a lot of things. But overall, in terms of being a stable solution, that is what comes from ServiceNow.

I would rate scalability very high, compared to competitive tools. It is highly scalable.

If we implement it for large enterprises they could have 10,000-plus end users. We have implemented it for small organizations as well, where they have just 1,000 end users.

Out of ten, I would rate technical support at seven. Sometimes, it seems to me that even though we are looking for a simple solution, if something has to be customized, ServiceNow technical support doesn't look at it and they simply say that we have to go with Professional Services. They won't look at any custom script or any custom implementation. Where we have done a small customization to something out-of-the-box, even in those cases there are times when ServiceNow is not able to support us.

Before ServiceNow, I had worked with BMC Remedy and worked with and compared Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow. We switched our services because ServiceNow is really easy to configure and it's a cloud tool. In terms of the performance and the implementation, it is really easy to configure.

From an initial setup perspective, it is very simple. That is why ServiceNow is the market trend, compared to Remedy or compared to HPE tools. It has already captured close to 60 or 70 percent of the market. The initial setup is really very user-friendly and very easy to set up in customer environments. Just drag and drop. You really don't need any technical skillset to deploy ServiceNow at customer sites.

Deployment time depends on what a customer is trying to implement, for example, the number of modules. If a customer is going with the basic ITSM module, it does not take more than two to three months to implement that complete ITSM suite.

In terms of implementation strategy, first we try to go with the out-of-the-box features and try to follow ServiceNow guided setups, which are available on the ServiceNow Wiki. A lot of information is there. We can blindly follow that for the initial setup and for the configuration.

The staff required for deployment and maintenance depend on the customer's requirements. If the requirements are really complex and they want a custom solution, then the timelines and the staff increase, based on that. There's no standard staffing, as such, in terms of implementation. It completely depends on the complexity of the requirements and, obviously, the size of the requirements.

Initially, the licensing model ServiceNow came up with was very good. But now, from a licensing perspective, they are changing their model day by day. It is becoming a bit expensive for customers.

The licensing is changing drastically. Especially for the Orchestration piece and the HR piece, the pricing is pretty high. Initially, when ServiceNow started, the licensing was very nominal and that's why customers adopted the tool. But now, in terms of replacing other tools with ServiceNow, they could probably work on the licensing part. Doing so will obviously increase the ServiceNow market and customers will start using it for that.

We directly migrated from Remedy to ServiceNow because of the growing market for ServiceNow vs Remedy. We got quite good feedback from some of our competitors and customers that ServiceNow is really good in terms of its integrations. In 2011 we called ServiceNow to demo the product. They came to our organization and we had the demo and we really liked the tool. Then we switched over to ServiceNow.

The configuration is very simple. I would definitely recommend it from a maintenance perspective and from a scalability perspective. It is a really good tool. You can replace your existing Remedy or HPSM with ServiceNow.

Regarding how extensively the solution is being used, it's no longer just an ITSM product. It's a platform, as such. Customers have started moving all their custom applications - in addition to ITSM, their non-ITSM - to the product. They've started building everything on ServiceNow. Slowly, customers are liking the tool and they are very happy to move everything onto ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. For the two missing points, as I mentioned, there are some new modules which need a lot of improvement. The HR Service Management is not very straightforward right now, in terms of the security rules. We have to spend a lot of time implementing the HR module. It is not really simple the way it is with the ITSM modules.

We use it for ITIL/ITOM catalog of services. ServiceNow is the CMDB for our organization, and we use the Discovery, Incident Management, Change and Project Management tools within ServiceNow to keep a centralized view of our enterprise. We have recently begun implementing the Governance and Risk (GRC) features as well.

Discovery has reduced, on average, the time to build/deploy devices within our environment by one hour. This may not seem like much but it adds up over time. It also reaps additional time savings with its ability to capture changes through subsequent discoveries over the life of the device. Discovery is the first piece in the CMDB chain for our organization, making sure that the device appears in the CMDB before it is needed (for, say, a change request).

ServiceNow Discovery is very valuable. It does, however, come at a steep cost of time and effort to implement it correctly. Do not be fooled into thinking it will "just work." Discovery, within any platform, requires meticulous planning and management to have it work for you. No discover solution is ever the "silver bullet" either, so plan to have more than one discovery engine implemented to cover your enterprise.

Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential.

Microsoft has caused some issues recently with its decision to move away from SNMP and WMI in favor of PowerShell management. ServiceNow will need to make changes to move away from these deprecated services and to discover these devices. Discovery engines universally rely upon SNMP to detect, at least at an initial level, what type of device they are talking to. Without SNMP, some other platform will need to advertise the device and its capabilities. Most applications offer API (ideally REST-based) connectivity and ServiceNow should expand upon its use of these connections.

The SaaS platform has been very reliable. ServiceNow has been one of the few SaaS solutions that we have chosen that has not had major issues. The agility to provide test/dev instances, and the seamless access provided by their support team, have been essential in allowing us to work with the solution.

As designed, the solution is incredibly scalable. It is possible for a customer to create logic, processes, or other rules that will hinder or limit this scalability, but that is not the fault of the platform. Having a knowledgeable staff and/or partner will reap huge dividends in the scale of the implementation.

Technical support is very good. Like in any support organization, there can be technicians who do not meet your requirements, but the vast majority of the ServiceNow support engineers have been helpful. As a side note, support is delivered via predominately Indian personnel. This is common in the IT industry, but we have seen it almost exclusively with ServiceNow support.

We used the CMDB that is offered within the product that we make/sell ourselves (Plex Online). It was not designed to meet the needs of a software company and we took the opportunity to move to something that was a better fit.

The initial setup was incredibly complex. I would pity any customer who decided to self-implement ServiceNow, unless they have experienced, dedicated staff for the length of the implementation. I was largely dedicated to the implementation of the CMDB, Event, Incident, and Discovery pieces of our implementation, with the help of an outside consulting firm, and it still took up a massive amount of my time to implement.

Many parts of the ServiceNow solution do work out-of-the-box. Being flexible also means being complex. Rarely can you just apply a change to all areas or systems. Screens (or forms) are unique to just about every part of the system, so if you want a uniform look and feel you will need to touch a lot of places.

Even if you do not think you will need an on-staff ServiceNow developer, you will want one. Many of the changes to the system are too involved for a standard admin to make (confidently) and there will be no shortage of ongoing work to keep this person (or persons) employed full-time.

We deployed in stages, bringing certain modules online as we were satisfied with the functionality. We are truly still implementing. The core of the system necessary for day-to-day operations was deployed in about one year. But changes and features are still being implemented. We continue to add and subtract from the system as we use it and as ServiceNow offers new or enhanced functionality. We also continue to develop integrations with other business systems.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we took on the system in phases. CMDB was first. This was perceived as necessary for all other functions for our organization since we are using it for ITIL/ITOM. The CMDB was manually populated and maintained at first, while Discovery was implemented. Project came next, along with Time Tracking. After that was Incident, Problem, and Change.

We kept to an Agile deployment methodology focusing on the small pieces needed to keep moving the larger whole along. Customization was kept to a minimum (where possible).

We did use a third-party service provider but it did not go well. I still could not imagine attempting to do it without them, but two years later, we are still replacing much of the work they did. There is a cautionary tale here of not going with the lowest bid.

The biggest failure on the part of our partner was with Discovery. They did not have the depth of knowledge necessary to get this delivered on time or, in fact, working in general. The level of effort needed to implement Discovery, in the end, dwarfed the rest of the platform. The partner absorbed the cost since they failed to understand exactly what it would take to deliver.

We have not done an actual ROI evaluation at this point. We determined that it was necessary from a business standpoint to change to a scalable SaaS solution and ROI was not necessary as part of the project scope. I believe that through Discovery and Automation we could likely create an ROI case. In other aspects, systems like Change and Incident may have introduced some toil to our process, but this may eventually become less of an issue as we continue to refine our process.

Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive.

We evaluated Service Cloud and ScienceLogic. ServiceNow really seemed to have the most complete offering.

If you plan on using Discovery, double whatever hours/manpower/money you had planned that it would cost. Do not let sales convince you that any part of the system "just works." You will ultimately end up modifying absolutely everything. Definitely look at using a reputable partner for implementation, unless you have a dedicated knowledgeable staff of ServiceNow users who have done it before (and not who just went through training).

We have 60 users for ITIL. We have provided limited access to our development and external management users.

For maintenance, we have two full-time employees. One is a dedicated ServiceNow developer tasked with customization and managing version upgrades. The other maintains the CMDB and Discovery process. I could see adding one more of each.

Deployment was an entire team effort, with different teams championing different modules of the application. At any given time, there were ten to 15 internal employees working on implementation with the assistance of five partner resources.

ServiceNow manages and maintains our ITOM/ITIL daily operations. It is a core piece of our environment that will only continue to grow. We have thought about removing the ITOM piece as we have not been able to implement or leverage it as we had initially planned, but we are still working on understanding what other tools we would need to replace the features and functionality. The primary limit we have on increasing usage across our company is the cost to license ITIL users.

We are trying to bring some ServiceNow projects to our team. We are trying to upgrade our ServiceNow knowledge by learning the modules and building our own application. We are presenting the application that we develop to our management. We can then market ourselves, showing that we have some ServiceNow capabilities so that we get some ServiceNow projects.

We have used almost all the features of ServiceNow within this application. Almost all the reports, data evaluation, dashboards, widgets, all the workflow-related stuff, integrations, etc. We have used each ServiceNow topic in this application.

We are building an application, as I mentioned. We are trying to build an Agile management application where we can track Agile projects, along with some traditional processes. We were able to build that tool in a controlled and better way in ServiceNow, when compared to Remedy. We can provide this application to our company for different projects.

For that, they will have to buy the ServiceNow instance. That is our aim. Once they start buying the ServiceNow instance, ultimately, we'll be getting our own support ID, so that we'll be able to work with ServiceNow very closely and become full-fledged, ourselves, on ServiceNow.

I have found many features that are important and that are easier when compared to Remedy; for example, the Scripted REST APIs and the Flow Designer. These all look like features at the configuration level. But in Remedy, there is coding to do, while here it's just a drag-and-drop. I found that very useful. Also, the Client scripts are simpler when you compare with Remedy. 

And finally, the upgrades. The upgrade in Remedy is a project. But here, it is zero downtime for any code changes in an upgrade. 

These are all things which really are advantages ServiceNow.

Earlier, ServiceNow had the ability where you could build your own UI. The standard UI is very restricted. It doesn't look as good, compared to Remedy. Building your own UI requires some additional coding, but the standard UI is not that good when compared to Remedy's UI.

When it comes to reference fields, there are some limitations where you aren't able to use them, like in relationship queries. In Remedy, when you click a menu, you get options directly, whereas here, if you use a reference field, it points you to a different form. So the UI experience totally changes for the end user. 

These are some of the ways ServiceNow could improve the UI, out-of-the-box.

Currently it's stable.

Many customers are choosing ServiceNow as their ITSM product and that is the reason we are planning to switch. ServiceNow is the trending tool for ITSM. Many customers have been migrating from Remedy to ServiceNow.

I have training on Cherwell which can be used as an ITSM software tool. Demand for Cherwell is very limited.

ServiceNow is a very good tool. The one challenge is that it involves scripting. Many things can be done through configuration and that is a very good part of ServiceNow. If you have some basic scripting knowledge, you can build your own application which can be used at any company or organization.

Considering the issues which I mentioned earlier related to the UI and the reference fields, out of ten I would rate ServiceNow an eight. To make it a ten they would have to come up with a better way of implementing UI.

We use it for ticketing.

We haven't been using it long enough for me to say how it has improved our organization.

Creating a ticket is much simpler in this tool. That is one big advantage. Also, the simplicity and ease of use are much better. I've used HPSM and it is very complex in comparison to ServiceNow.

Change Management is the area I have found that this tool can be improved because there are so many fields which are missing, such as urgency of the customer request and how the priority is defined. These are some of the areas in which I found that BMC Remedy is much better than ServiceNow.

I haven't found many stability issues in this tool. The uptime is relatively good.

Scalability is not a big issue for this tool. It's good.

Technical support is an eight out of ten.

I was not part of the team or a decision maker for using this tool. I am an end user. It was purchased by our organization.

Other tools I have used and evaluated are BMC Remedy vs ServiceNow and Micro Focus Service Manager vs ServiceNow.

I would recommend looking into all aspects of ticketing tools and I would advise people to use BMC Remedy because of the scalability and the features available. If you are not very technical then I would recommend ServiceNow.

Most of the users of ServiceNow in our company are Level 1 and Level 2 engineers, and some of them are problem managers. We have more than 200 people using the tool.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. The two points off are for some features which are not there in Change Management and in the ITSM software. The rating is as high as it is because of its simplicity and ease of use.

We are an integrator. We help our clients to implement ServiceNow for their companies.

The most valuable features generally depend on our client's needs, but most often it's some type of basic setup like incident management, request fulfillment, SLAs, problem management, change of management, and knowledge management.

In other cases, it can be something like an ITBM suite. Currently, we are implementing project management and Scaled Agile Framework for one of our customers.

It actually has quite a wide list of modules and processes.

There are Virtual Task Boards in the tool in the latest releases. There are many of them in the Scaled Agile Framework. There is some room there for improvement. It's really quite promising but, at the same time, it could be improved and I believe it will be improved soon.

The solution is quite stable. It's actually a big platform with a lot of plugins and a lot of things being introduced in each version. Sometimes there is not enough information about releases. For example, right now we have an issue understanding what the roadmap is for the Scaled Agile Framework.

It's very scalable. It's good, really good. I have experience working with other IT solutions like HPE/Micro Focus, and ServiceNow, in this regard, is all in the cloud. There are no issues thinking about the physical infrastructure. So it's very good.

Sometimes it limits you. For example, in CIS, they had a lot of issues working with a SaaS, but generally it is good.

I haven't had a chance to check technical support myself, but my colleagues say it could be faster. But in comparison to my previous experience with HPE/Micro Focus, ServiceNow is the same. It's good but it could be better.

When I was first assigned to this position and added to the team, and entered the ServiceNow world, this product and its use for clients were already ongoing. It was not new to the other members of the team. I was the newbie here. I checked out some training materials and I had some previous experience in the ITSM world. I just onboarded and started playing this role. It was pretty simple for me personally.

For the company, I can't comment on the initial setup because ServiceNow was here before me.

For the particular client we're working on, I joined the project last summer and it finished this summer. Before that, it had been ongoing for a year or year-and-a-half. But it was a big implementation, ten or 12 modules implemented.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there is most often a need in the client's company and they ask us to do a preliminary assessment and some onsite discovery. After the discovery, we build a prototype and finish the requirements-gathering. Then comes the implementation part which is mostly done through an Agile approach. After that there is testing on our side and user-acceptance testing on the client's side. Finally, it is released.

Speaking in light of my previous experience with HPE, at that time, around 2012 or so, if ServiceNow was a bit cheaper it would have had a good chance of our company choosing it at that time.

Now, ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive. If it were cheaper it would probably be better in this market niche.

Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably.

Long ago, when our company itself was choosing a platform, a solution for the company to support, there was a big analysis effort and investigation of what was on the market. Back then we chose HPE. But that was really long ago and it's not relevant to my activities and my experience currently.

My advice would be not to try to implement it by yourself. You could spend a lot of time without any considerable outcome.

We have ten clients right now and some of them have 1,000 users, all together. They have 20 to 50 engineers.

Deployment and maintenance on the client's size and their requirements: how quickly they want the implementation done, and on how many people create tickets, etc. The basic team is five to seven people who implement Service Now. For support of the solution, it's a maximum of three to five people.

I would rate ServiceNow at about nine out of ten. One of the things to be improved is their transparency in working with partners. Being a partner of ServiceNow, sometimes it's not clear how we should check for new updates; for example, this Scaled Agile Framework, etc. Working with HPE was more transparent for me. I had good communication points to address questions, not on the support level but on a higher level, to get answers to questions quite quickly and informatively.

We are a large integrator with more than 20,000 IT engineers. We work with many vendors including HPE, Micro Focus, Oracle, and some dozen other vendors.

As a developer, I have mostly work on agent management and service catalog items, to create business tools. I write scripts to satisfy customer requirements.

Year after year they have implemented more functionalities and come out with more enhancements, as well as new modules.

The Service Portal could be improved. There are some things in it which are somewhat difficult for me to understand.

It is a stable product.

I have not encountered any issues with its scalability.

If there is an issue we raise a high-level ticket. We usually get a response within a day or, if it a priority, within two or three hours. They have provided us solutions that we've implemented in our company.

I started my career with ServiceNow only. I haven't used any other tool. I have a little bit of knowledge about Remedy, but I don't have any practical experience with it. My practical experience is only with ServiceNow.

The process of loading everything into ServiceNow is very straightforward. It is not complex.

ServiceNow is great. It's flexible and it is very simple for process flow or idea flow.

I'm a consultant, so I primarily work on projects implementing Service Now inside of different organizations.

The biggest improvement I see is that unstructured work, which would primarily be worked on within spreadsheets or within emails, is able to be centralized, managed end-to-end, and have that visibility and structure in ServiceNow. That provides enormous productivity gains. 

In addition, it provides the ability to meet internal IT assurance around audit trails.

Finally, the improved visibility helps in decision-making for senior leaders and executives.

One feature of ServiceNow that is important is the workflow engine. From my perspective, the power to be able to structure processes, represent workforce management for organizations, and the visibility provided by the reporting are additional top features.

ServiceNow is divided up into a lot of modules, so I'll give an example, instead of going into every single module.

For me, there's a real opportunity, especially within the IT Service Management suite, to give a much better overall view of the workflow that individuals have across the different applications. At the moment, a lot of information is quite siloed in the different tables in ServiceNow. There is a real opportunity to present, in a centralized way, some form of universal work list, to give better ideas around demand and supply of resources, and then help prioritize that work.

The only other thing that I'd say about ServiceNow, in general, is commercially related around licensing, and it's a big inhibitor for a lot of our customers, especially those who are innovators on the platform. I've got a couple of really good example clients where they are limited in what they can do with the product. If they were to do what they wanted to do, the licensing that would come about, from a platform runtime licensing perspective, would mean it wouldn't have the same value proposition.

An improvement area, to summarize, would be better licensing for when clients are trying to be innovative on the platform.

The stability of ServiceNow is excellent. I've never had any issues around its stability, scalability, availability, or any of those metrics.

ServiceNow technical support has always been excellent. They are quick to respond, they have good, strong technical capabilities, they're good at communicating and getting in touch with you.

I have used BMC Remedy previously and the primary reason for switching to ServiceNow was around the fact that ServiceNow is cloud-based, scalable, and easily configurable.

Overall, the setup is fairly simple. You have to have a point of reference to compare it to. If I think about other cloud-based tools that I've worked with, by comparison, I would say it is most definitely simple.

Myself, being a consultant and implementing ServiceNow multiple times over in different organizations, an average implementation, which would result in a minimum viable product - standing up ServiceNow to achieve some form of business value - would be 12 weeks.

I typically see a 12-week implementation of ServiceNow achieved with approximately six individuals for the deployment. Ongoing maintenance of ServiceNow will typically involve the equivalent of four FTEs.

I don't have any data points at the moment, but I know some of our clients have articulated ROI as part of the benefits they have realized. The ROI is definitely positive for clients that we've worked for.

ServiceNow pricing is an art, not a science. The deal depends on how commercially savvy you are, which does make it something that is quite difficult to get right. It is most definitely an opportunity area for ServiceNow to improve and have more visibility around pricing of the different products within the platform.

Other options would be BMC Remedy and Cherwell, from an ITSM perspective. For HRSM, alternative solutions are Workday and SuccessFactors.

My advice would be to engage with an implementation partner that has good experience and definitely not to underestimate the organizational-change activities, like training and communication, that are required. ServiceNow shouldn't be treated as purely a technology solution. People, processes, communication, and training need to be factored in when implementing.

We've implemented ServiceNow in government organizations with up to 9,000 people, in a couple of scenarios, using it for either IT service management or HR service management, predominantly. The roles of the users varied within the government.

In terms of how extensively ServiceNow is used, every client we work with has a roadmap of additional functionality that they would like to use in ServiceNow. To generalize, there are different extents of use but each definitely has a roadmap of continuous improvement and use of more features or modules of the product.

I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten. Some of the points that I touched on above would make it a perfect ten: more visible and consistent licensing around the cost of licensing; better ability to innovate on the platform without incurring licensing that isn't representative of the innovation that's being created.

As a developer, I work on ServiceNow for HR solutions and a few other Service Portal functions.

Other solutions are integrated with different applications and tools, but ServiceNow is quite centralized, fully managed, and you can find everything in one place.

There are features included in the new release for intelligent software, like the chatbot. For HR services, the HR agent which is in that chatbot has been fantastic. There have been advancements in ServiceNow.

It gives you all the APIs out-of-the-box and you can directly write code with them.

There are a few things that it needs to improve, like automation of most things out-of-the-box. For example, when it comes to cloud management, we are still going with manual intervention. Instead of that, if we had an out-of-the-box feature available, that would be great.

Also, the first time we looked at the Service Portal, it was quite hard to understand its interface. People were looking for things, like the email functionality in Service Portal. That was not available and there were other things in Service Portal that were not up to the mark.

It's stable and it's improving. You can't compare ServiceNow with any other tool.

I have seen many changes in it. Previously, it was limited in its functionality, only for configuration management and the like, but now you can see it has many applications in it.

The scalability depends on how you utilize the tool.

As for the number of users on ServiceNow, I have been involved in a project where it was to be utilized by almost two million users. That was the biggest project I have worked on. There were internal users and outside users.

There were issues during the migration. They have certain locations, certain countries with different data, with different languages. We usually do the migration according to the country in which it's operating. We were doing certain migrations and, all of a sudden, when it reached a level above one million users, the nodes were very full and ServiceNow was unable to respond. We thought maybe it was due to our scripts. We checked everything first but it was working fine in the dev environment and the test environment. But when it came to production, there was a big risk and a big impact on the business.

We reached ServiceNow, even though it was not business hours. They said they had certain things on a low infrastructure and they told us that they would be migrated to a higher infrastructure and that we would have access again. We implemented it on a Sunday morning and we thought it would be working but on Monday we had a huge number of emails and calls and it was a day full of pressure. But we were able to solve it and get it back within an hour.

Usually, we don't reach out to ServiceNow until we know the problem is not in our hands. As a gold partner, our company has access to on-call support and direct access to ServiceNow's experts. We are able to contact people there, at the business level, and get things done.

We recently had an application tool that was supporting certain tasks in HR case-management. That tool has certain capabilities but it's not up to the mark when you compare it with ServiceNow. It provides you details about the task, but it does not have the basic functionalities like chat and email. It has to be integrated with other tools for those things.

As a developer and partner, most of the time the setup is customized. Right now, I'm working on a module called "Ask your HR." There are different sets of modules available and inside each module there are different sets of reports and functionalities, such as drag-and-drop, etc. It's full of customization. Whatever you're building, it has to be done from scratch. It's not like the functionality is available out-of-the-box.

We do follow certain documentation and steps. Whenever we do a migration or implementation, we check for the available system capacity. We have a team that allows us to do testing on it and see what kinds of things can be done, or how we can migrate directly to ServiceNow.

We usually don't go with a full-fledged migration, we do it in phases, Wave 1, Wave 2, and Wave 3. Each wave has certain things in it. We will plan it accordingly and, once the wave is successful, we'll do regression testing of certain scenarios and check whether it is up to the mark or not.

Back in 2011, BMC Remedy was at a peak and people were focusing on it. But starting in 2014 and 2015, ServiceNow came on and its competitors were watching. It went from about ten to 20 percent of the market to almost 40 percent of the market.

I would rate ServiceNow at nine out of ten. It is all about improvement, about getting things from your legacy system to the latest one.

It's used for a helpdesk.

It really hasn't improved the way our organization functions. I don't really like ServiceNow.

I don't think any of the features are important. I'm not really a ServiceNow fan.

It's not very secure, it's web-based, and I prefer Remedy. Both the security and the web interface could be improved.

It is stable. It seems good.

There have been no issues that I know of with scalability.

It's sold as a less expensive solution, but it has to be highly modified. That's where you get into the cost.

Make sure to look into all the configuration costs and the customization. Be aware that it's web-based. You're probably going to have to put holes in your firewalls and need to do a complete security review.

As an end user, I would rate it a seven out of ten. I don't think it's very secure, and it's web-based, and Remedy is really the standard that it's judged against.

We use it as a service desk solution, for ticketing.

First of all, we had several tasks that were performed manually by the service desk and infrastructure teams, but now we have been able to automate those processes and reduce the manual intervention. For example, when an employee from one of those teams goes on vacation, we can block the account and, when he comes back, we can unblock access and reset the password, and everything is done automatically.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of development for customization.

For example, we are starting now to expand the tool for HR and some other departments. They need applications or processes to improve their tasks. For instance, right now we are discussing, with the Internal Risk team, creation of an application inside ServiceNow so they can open a ticket and follow all the steps according to their process. One of the nice things about ServiceNow is that, if you have your process, you can design the ticket and the form according to your process. That is very useful and can be done quickly.

There's one that I would like to see improved to reduce the cost of our ServiceNow, related to the resetting and unblocking of passwords for users who forget their passwords. We had a conversation about this with ServiceNow. We don't have a huge amount of password reset requests, but the minimum package of resets that ServiceNow offers is much more than we need. In conversations with other companies that have a similar profile to ours, they complained about the same thing: "Why should I have to buy a minimum number of password resets, when that amount is much more than I need?" They should have some kind of scaling of the reset package, like zero to 100, 101 to 300, etc. That would be a little bit more useful for us. That package is very expensive. It's more expensive than if I were to have someone in-house who was dedicated to doing those tasks.

It's a very stable product, it has a very good SLA and RTO. So far, so good, and I expect it will continue like that.

I haven't had any issues with scalability so far, but we're a medium-small company with about 300 users. The most active users are the service desk, infra, and development teams. Overall, we have 50 or 60 heavy users.

Here in Brazil, we have local support from a company called Fast Lane. They are the enterprise that did the development and implementation of the solution in our company. We don't have any issues with them. They are very fast and very helpful. They help us with the design of our processes and the tools.

We had a simple tool with which you would just open a ticket, without SLA, no features. But we had internal issues and realized we should improve our processes. That's why we went to ServiceNow.

The initial setup wasn't so easy, but it wasn't a ServiceNow issue, it was an internal issue. Because it was new for the organization, setting up a cloud solution, we needed to open some ports in the firewall.

One detail we didn't explore so much during the negotiations with ServiceNow was related to Edge Encryption. That is a feature that encrypts all the information that is saved in ServiceNow. It was requested by information security here in our company. We bought it, but the setup for that tool was new here, in Brazil, from what I understood from the vendor. It's a little complicated to have all of the information and all the details set up for it. It took a little bit longer than we expected, but it was a management situation. There was no impact to the business.

We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less. ServiceNow is a little bit expensive for us, here in Brazil, due to taxes, etc.

We talked with HPE and IBM, but both are on-prem solutions, whereas ServiceNow is a cloud solution. That fact was very important for us, that it is not an on-prem solution, as it reduces our internal cost of support. 

Also, the development time for each process is much shorter than with an on-prem solution. For example, with on-prem, I would have internal processes like change management, open a ticket, fill out all the information, and get the request approved. After that, it would need to be implemented. That would take a long time.

It is very good having this tool. Getting it going went much faster than I expected. We did the setup and had it in production in six months.

The biggest problem for me was our internal process and not Service Now. For example, convincing people to go to a cloud solution, and getting engagement with the solution from information security, were challenges. If you don't have engagement from information security, the project is going to take longer than you expect. The big change for the company, with this solution, is that you're not going to host your data internally, on-prem. You are going to put all your data in a cloud solution. When we spoke about the solution here, within our company, some people said, "Wow! Are you crazy? You are going to put customer information in a cloud that you don't know?" So there are a lot of questions. ServiceNow has all the answers, but if you don't have engagement from information security, it will take you longer.

We have a lot of things we can improve internally, regarding information security, but because we are just starting out, we need our process to mature. I believe ServiceNow can help that a lot. All the features can support us in the future if we expand the tool. We have new models to improve on the automation of our processes in our data center.

My only concern is that when we started to talk with ServiceNow, we received very good attention from them but, after we signed the contract, I didn't know who, in ServiceNow, was taking care of my account. The person sent me an email but he had never been here to ask, "What do you need? How is it going? How is your project?" We didn't get any attention from ServiceNow. We had very good negotiations in the beginning, they were very attentive. But after we signed the contract, they changed my account manager and, today, I really don't know who that guy is.

I would very much like to have him here to discuss the roadmap of the solution or to see what else I can buy. I would like to negotiate some issues that we have, like password resets. I would talk with ServiceNow but, if they are not going to be close to me, I'm not going to spend time running after them to talk with them. I talk with the suppliers and they are helping me, instead of ServiceNow.

I rate ServiceNow at eight out of ten. Why eight and not ten? The relationship with ServiceNow is important for me. I would like to have more engagement from them, to have them here, at my company, so we can talk more strategically. But compared to the other vendors, it gets an eight because it's a cloud solution and I don't have any issues with technical parts or its performance. The tool is very reliable.

We use ServiceNow mostly for our IT ticketing business. Recently we set up the Request portion of ServiceNow and we're using it as well.

It enables us to interact with our end users and helps us resolve whatever incident they might be having. We get incident reports and it helps us get set up with trends so that we'll get resolutions to those incidents.

I like the reporting aspect of it. It helps us know where we stand regarding the types of issues we're receiving, the types of incidents that come in.

It also shows us trends. That enables us to possibly predict an issue that might come up in the future as well as what is happening right now. We like that feature. With it, we can either avoid certain issues or know where we need to focus more regarding the service we provide.

I would like the reporting aspect to be better, including the graphs. It could have some way for us to easily to export to a csv or spreadsheet so that if a graph cannot be provided by ServiceNow itself, we would be able to use other applications to create them.

Also, if there was a feature that enabled us to interact with end users directly within ServiceNow, like an instant-messaging type of feature, that would be great. 

Another nice feature would be a way to easily to assign tickets and incidents to the techs who will be working on them. That could be better. Other than that, the system seems to be working just fine.

We've had no issues with the stability of the solution.

We are okay with the scalability.

I would rate technical support at seven or eight out of ten. They are pretty much on time. They're willing to help.

When I started with the company, we outsourced our issues. When we brought IT in-house, ServiceNow was the first system we used.

The setup was straightforward, easily understandable with the training we did. There might have been some kinks but everything was worked out in due time. It was fine.

There were a few other options we evaluated but I don't remember the specific product names.

Learn anything you need to know direclty from ServiceNow. It's a good product. I can't really knock it. Go ahead and give it a try. As long as it fits your environment, I think it's a fine product.

I would rate ServiceNow at seven out of ten. I would like to see a little more automation. It may just be the type of license we have which doesn't give us full automation, but that would be one of the things that I would like in ServiceNow. That would make things easier for both the techs and the end users. In addition, I would like to see a better workflow setup within ServiceNow.

• Work intake 
• Project management 
• Project for a 30 person marketing and communications team at a Big 4 professional services firm.
  

• It helps improve service levels and reduce team stress.  

• It provides internal clients with greater transparency about their projects and deliverables.

• Ability to configure a service catalog with defined SLAs.

• Single window for all work requests.
• Ability to bundle various deliverables into a single project work request.

None.

None.

We used a homebrew solution developed by (and for) our IT department. It was far too complex for marketing users.

The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources. 

We used an in-house team.

The IT department conducted a vendor evaluation, but I am not aware of which solutions were considered.

It is a very robust tool. We use it for all back office teams in the firm, resulting in a common interface and intake process across HR, IT, Marketing, and Finance.

We build out video knowledge bases, how-to knowledge bases for self-service support and agent use. We integrate into a number of different ticketing systems, service management platforms, helpdesk platforms, and call center systems.

We are a ServiceNow partner and we have a ServiceNow instance. We use it for ticketing support, ticketing systems. It has worked really well for what we do.

We have set a standard around the way we build content. We have found that if we build for ServiceNow, it will pretty much import anywhere. The format is very similar. ServiceNow seems to be more of a standard interface and their knowledge import specs are pretty consistent with everything else. We have had a few we have had to tweak but, generally, if we build it for ServiceNow, in a lot of cases we can take a ServiceNow file and import it into any other system and it will work fine. That's the biggest benefit.

The biggest feature is that it is cloud-based, so it's always updated, it's always current. We don't have to worry about patches, revisions. We're always working with the latest version.

The features continue to improve. We get new features and we can choose to turn them on or not, but we're always getting them. That is part of the program.

Some enhancements to the self-service platform would be helpful. That part is still a little barebone. There are some things that they could do better that we have suggested to them.

Also, the mobile app is not bad, but it's limited. They are going to be working on that, I'm sure, over the years.

It seems to be very solid. We have not run into any errors or problems, although we're not a very heavy user. If somebody was processing thousands of tickets a day, maybe they would run into something, but for us, it's solid. There are no issues at all.

It seems to be able to accommodate any number of clients, agents, admins. We're a small company, so we don't stress it very much with the number we have in the platform. But everything that I see there, I think it will go. They have large, global corporations working on it, so I think it's pretty solid. That is what I've seen, but not what I've experienced.

Their technical support is very good. We're in the partner program so we have a different development program. We access a different group within support compared to the support a regular client would access. When we need help, the people we work with are very good. Things get resolved, things don't linger.

First, decide what your processes need to be. Determine what your environment needs, what's important, what your priorities are, what your process methodology is, and find a platform to fit that. If you are trying to find a platform and you don't go through that exercise first, you're just tying yourself up in knots. If you choose the platform first, then you are going to match your processes to the platform. If you haven't been through a process, an internal system environmental analysis, to see how things work and what you need, you'll never be happy and you'll wind up changing platforms every couple of years or every time your CIO changes.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria for us are that they

• are cloud-based
• have ongoing development
• provide API capability so we can integrate whatever we need.

There has to be the ability to write APIs as you need them, so you can hook in whatever you need to connect to it.

I would rate ServiceNow at eight out of 10. They're good but they can get better. From what we've seen, they are making improvements, they listen to feedback. They're not sitting still, they continuing to evolve, continuing to develop, add features, add capacity.

The primary use case is IT service management. It encompasses quite a few things, such as incident records, change records, etc.

It uses a common base of data and allows different types of records to pull from that same base of data.

The ability to link different types of records with each other.

• The ability to embed help information onto the screens.
• The scalability needs improvement.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate stability as a seven.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate scalability as a four.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate technical support as a seven.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The most important thing to have in place is the face of the configuration data.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• The development model: How are updates made and promoted to production.
• Ability to embed user help information directly to the interface.
  

We use it for incidents, incident management, sales management, and problem management. We are very happy with the product.

We are about to upgrade to IT Service Management edition on September.

It enables communication. The benefit is that we can keep track of all the changes and the incidences.

We can keep track of incidences. There is a bucket where we keep all our information, and it enables communication between stakeholders. It helps us collaborate with each other.

We would like to have an Asset Management and/or Project Management feature enabled in this version and in the IT Service Management edition.

The Express edition does not allow the option for scripting.

It is very stable. We have only had five minutes of downtime in three years. 

Compared to other companies, we are small (270 people). Scalability does not affect us.

If it is a high priority, they will respond very quickly. If it is a low priority issue, it might take some time, some three or four days. I would rate the technical support as a 10 out of 10.

We didn't have another solution before ServiceNow.

The initial setup was straightforward, but we did some core customizations. Therefore, we did need more time to finish setting it up.

I would recommend it as a product.

Most important criteria when selecting a solution: 

• Stability
• Reputation in the market
• Is the product well-known?
• How long has the product been offered?

We primarily use this for our North America practice of IT Asset Management and IT Service Management (incident, problem, change, and knowledge). We also use it for HR Case Management and are now developing business applications in order to perform things like IP and Application Management.

I like the ease of use of the ServiceNow platform. 

We have used ServiceNow for HR case management, IT Asset Management, IT Service Management, and custom business applications

The value of features has changed with each release. Initially I was impressed with the automation capability. Now, the look and feel is a valuable benefit for adoption. The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations.

I would like to see Advanced Intelligent Automation. I can't wait to see how ServiceNow continues to build out the automation capability with things like RPA, OCR, and even machine learning capabilities to help make giant steps forward in the ITSM space.

The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful. Combine this with automation and you have a great tool which is built on ITSM principles.

Used for the entire company (400K), like HR, service desk and other functions.

Easy to implement and consolidate different platforms and users with useful functionalities.

It has an excellent capability to integrate different access points. It is very user-friendly, too. 

It has a higher cost compared to local/regional solutions. 

Local solutions have lower costs.

I would recommend ServiceNow.

Microsoft and Oracle Software tracking and management.

• Maintains a real-time view of license position. 
• Compies with contract terms to avoid penalties and the impact that an audit can have on day-to-day activity 
• Identifies better ways to license software or eliminate unused software to save money and maintain a choice between buying more licenses or reclaiming licenses to stay within compliance. 

Oracle and Microsoft license software catalog. 

Needs additional software titles and easier normalization.

ServiceNow's out-of-box process configurations and service-based CMDB data model have revolutionized IT Service Management transformations. Leveraging out-of-box configurations and using frequent small-scope improvement releases (DevOps) has proven to be an effective approach for ensuring timely, lasting improvements to the core service management process.

The traditional ITIL "gather all process requirements 1st" approach to tool design never worked well. In fact, organizations attempting this "Define all Process Requirements" approach would frequently customize the tool to be similar to the process/tool that they were replacing rather than adopting the proven ITSM best practices embedded in ServiceNow. This approach extends the time to value by limiting the focus on ensuring the critical process integration points that drive rapid quantifiable process improvements.

With the right expert guidance facilitating the effectiveness of a strong executive sponsor to ensure the successful adoption of a true service-based culture, a SeviceNow implementation can drive quantifiable process improvements in three to six months in core processes, such as Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, Asset and CFG management.

With these core processes integrated and effectively automated, an IT organization is able to transform infrastructure monitoring activities into a true service-based and proactive Event Management capability. This in-turn drives rapid and sustained improvements to service Availability, Capacity, and Demand management processes. Quantifiable service levels may then be negotiated and aligned to meet actual business process requirements.

Bottom line: ServiceNow has shattered the "Five years to a successful Service Management transformation" limitation. With the prerequisite guidance and sponsorship, measurable, and sustainable service level improvements, cost efficiencies can be achieved in 12 months or less!

Note:

1. The importance of acquiring qualified an ITSM expert and their guidance can not be overemphasized. This is preferably to someone outside the current organizational culture.
2. The need for a skilled and charismatic executive sponsor is a proven success-critical requirement for rapid sustained improvements. The right leader will recognize the need for a compelling vision and formal sponsorship strategy for the entire IT leadership team, which they will be accountable for, will ensure the culture change from the traditional siloed infrastructure, and component management focused and heroic effort based culture to a true customer focused and service based culture.

A three phase IT Service Management transformation project resulted in achieving a first year target of less than 4% sustained monthly improvements in true customer experienced availability (based on Incident MTTR metrics) for three key IT Services (three business process automation solutions with formal SLAs). Results obtained were within six months of the project start date.

• Phase 1: Formal process 'maturity' assessments and detailed recommendations. Service Mgmt. Org. restructure with dedicated Process Owners and Service Mgrs. aligned with newly defined IT services (business process related Services). Vision and Sponsorship workshops for IT leadership team resulting in formal Sponsorship Strategy and communications plan.
• Phase 2: Rapid Process Design/Improvement workshops with process owners for Incident, Problem, Change, Release, CFG (ServiceNow PM), and Knowledge Mgmt. designing "to-be" process documents, and integrated, coordinated three month implementation plans. Tool design and implementation plan documented.
• Phase 3: After three month implementation of Phase 2 processes, Rapid Process Design workshops started for Availability, Service Level, Capacity, Demand, and Event management processes. Process documents with detailed process integrations and tool/CMDB requirements spanning all 11 processes. Formal implementation plan deliverables. Coordinated implementation projects initiated.

Primary areas of inefficiencies and delays were related to change resistance and lack of support from the IT Team Lead and IT Manager level staff for involvement in ServiceNow design and training workshops, and lack of support for governing new process policies.

Bottom line issue: Not agreeing in strategy workshops for the recommendation to base performance measures for all IT staff and bonus potential for IT leadership staff on the key process maturity improvement metric targets.

This basic three phase, rapid process design workshop methodology, using an out-of-the-box solution, then the weekly ServiceNow release schedule approach to evolve process designs, has proven successful in meeting target maturity improvement metrics in all cases

Deployment issues were very rare in all projects that had a dedicated ServiceNow Development lead (with a team of Dev and DB skilled staff assigned to the project) involved as a team member with the combined process owners in Rapid Process Design workshops. These workshops involve more than five process owners designing each other's new processes, based on ServiceNow out-of-the-box requirements, guided by the Dev lead and the ITSM expert facilitator (a seasoned facilitator with ITIL Expert certification and ServiceNow bootcamp credentials is recommended).

This approach ensures all process owners and the tool design expert understand the complex integration points between all processes; a key to CMDB relationship requirements insight.

As the tool is SaaS and customization is minimized in the critical early design phase by the Process Workshop's "out-of-the-box" approach, stability and scalability are optimized.

It is excellent, always. This tool and the ServiceNow organization is a class act.

It is excellent, in all cases.

Have experience with BMac software, HPE, IBM and other leading ITSM tools.

ServiceNow has nailed the basic ITIL process integration requirements and the CMDB model is service-based out-of-the-box.

This approach using out-of-the-box and frequent small revisions only works with ServiceNow's quality underpinning best practice framework.

Expert vendor facilitator.

• Simplicity of Change Manager
• Product based on user experience
• Nuclear integration

The ease of implementing the operational processes gives my clients the ability to streamline their day-to-day operations quickly, and allows huge visibility for managers and decision makers.

All areas.

Five years.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

I'm an implementer. I work with several solutions.

Very easy and simple to implement; a third of the time of other solutions.

The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify.

With ServiceNow, it is difficult to recommend another solution. Only the price might be a reason to suggest other solutions. Ivanti could be a good solution.

It is the best solution in the market.

The analytics - we like to keep track of how much work everyone is doing. We need to make sure that everyone is being efficient and being utilized. At the same time, regarding hardware, we want to make sure all the hardware is being utilized.

The other valuable feature is the asset management. It is the same thing, but with hardware. We want to know how much hardware - computers and anything else that we have in stock before we actually order them. Again, it probably boils down to the cost.

We're getting a good cost-efficiency. In my line of work, we deploy between 50 to 80 computers per day, break/fix new computers, laptops, you name it, we have it. We want to keep track of whether or not we need to replace a whole laptop, or just replace a hardware component that's failing on it. At the same time, we also want to make sure that we're keeping on par with the new technology, so that way we don't get left behind.

Most people are discussing UIs, but I'm a developer. I would say 80-90% of the people would appreciate that, that's easy for them, but from a developer perspective, it's hard for me, because for me it's clunky. Just give me a spreadsheet or give me a Notepad and I can write it down. For me, I would rather have that - give me an option to do that, maybe a CLI, instead of a UI.

Earlier today we were doing things such as merging data. What happened was I tried to merge one company to another. It's the same company, it's just a misspelled name. There was a bug - that there was supposed to be an undo button, but it wasn't there. It's one of those things, but then I asked a person how to do it, and they can't figure it out.

ServiceNow is such a complex piece of software. It's trying to be everything. The way I look at it, sooner or later, it's going to fail, because it's trying to do a lot of stuff. I can't say what or where, but it will. We've seen it a lot of times already with other products. You can't be everything, and that's what they're trying to do.

We don't really use much of ServiceNow except for the ticketing system, for now, so we don't have any issues. If there's a new hire we can add them fine, and it's quick. If there is new hardware, our admin just creates a new hardware form, and it's there, so I don't see any problem with that.

From my standpoint it's easy. As long as you attend an event where they teach you how to do it, you'll pick it up right away, because before I attended one, I had no clue how ServiceNow worked. I went to one for three days and now I at least have, about 25% knowledge of how ServiceNow works. I guess if you attend an event, you'll pick it up right away.

Right now we use ServiceNow, we use SCCM, we use Case. It's three different bits of software but basically what we use them for is as a reporting tool, like I said for the analytics of how we need hardware or tickets are coming in, but ServiceNow is mostly just for tickets.

Granted there's pros and cons in being everything that it wants to be. In our experience, we have Case, we have SCCM: sure, you're generating a report in SECM, and then you're generating another report in Case, there's a slight chance that the result will be different. If you have one thing, one software that's doing everything for you, the reports and the results will be consistent. I see that it's not done yet, it's not complete yet, but in the long run I also see it coming up with a bunch of problems.

One of the things that I've only recently learnt is how flexible it is and how much you can do with it that I wouldn't have thought of. I've only been using ServiceNow for a short time, so it's been great to learn about all the different stuff you can do with it. So definitely consolidating everything and just putting a nice visual interface and a nice visual experience to all the data and information.

Having quick easy access to information is crucial in any business but especially in the medical field. Real-time information that's it easy to understand is critical. In some cases, it could mean life or death for our patients, so just having that readily available and digestible and easy to interpret is critical. We have customized so much, so I think that might have contributed to the learning curve for me, just figuring out where the organization had put things and what terminology they use and where to look for certain things.

In the time that I've been using it, it's been a pretty great experience.

I haven't noticed any major issues. Again, I've only been there for a short period of time.

The entire time I've been here we've been using ServiceNow.

We have customized so much, so I think that might have contributed to the learning curve for me, just figuring out where the organization had put things and what terminology they use and where to look for certain things.

I'd definitely recommend that you take a look and figure out what their needs are really. What are their goals, why are they looking at ServiceNow in the first place, and just go in there and take a look and get a demo or something and just jump in and give it a look.

It's pretty great, especially being at Knowledge 16 where I saw all the different possibilities and all the different things you can do. I'm really excited to take that knowledge and get back to do more cool stuff with it. I'd say coming in I maybe would've said 7/10, but coming out of the event I'd say it's definitely a great product.

For the most part, we have used prior ITSM solutions and they have been a bit more difficult to integrate and customize into the rest of the things that we do as they are standalone products. Something like ServiceNow ITSM, where there is such a good foundation within a relationship between items and some very good capabilities to extend into our existing automation, workflows and things of that nature, is something that we're definitely looking forward to.

We want to end up getting set up as part of Discovery with a type of automatic relationship. In addition, we have been looking at a means to provide a service catalog experience to the business as a whole and are looking forward to potentially implementing a service portal.

Actually, the biggest problem that I see for it, especially in a smaller organization, is that there are plenty of partners. We've got a fairly advanced IT organization. We do a lot of relatively advanced stuff for the size that we are, but ServiceNow itself is so big and to some extent, there is a significant amount of complexity that you have, a big learning curve I would say, in order to really get on board.

It doesn't mean that you can't attack it in pieces and things like that, but I think one of the problems I've had just in getting involved within the last couple of months, is trying to kind of weed out what I don't necessarily need to look at and focus on, just a specific area and trying to find best practice documentation of that matter is, has been a challenge.

In many cases, it really just doesn't exist. I mean, we know we've got the documentation and everything else, and they tell you all the things that you can do. I mean, again, it's one of these things where I think everybody likes to begin a little better, would like to begin with a template, or some kind of a best practice template given their situation if they can find it, and then, you know, kind of build from there. Because when you're starting just with a completely blank scratch pad, you just don't know where to go.

I think the thing that I've always been concerned with implementing a new product is being able to really spend a proper amount of time upfront with design and making sure I'm designing something that won't limit my choices or my abilities to use it, or will keep me from having to just go back and completely rewrite the whole thing in the future. I've not gotten that comfortability yet with the product and it's after a couple months. There's a huge learning curve with the product.

Also, we have not really had a good view of our different configuration items. 

I don't really think that we're running into too many stability issues.

The product scale's wonderful. We don't have to worry about the scalability and someplace else. Even within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature.

Most of what we have to just be concerned with is that we almost have too much information. It's like going from having nothing to taking a fire hose worth of information and trying to figure out, "Okay, what do we really maybe not have to pay attention to initially? What are we going to focus on?" I wouldn't say there are any issues with the product right now from the performance and scalability point of view; it's been performing very well.

Altiris is the product we're getting out of. I think there's a lot to be said for actually having a web-hosted solution these days. There are a lot of things you don't want to actually bother to manage yourself internally.

I think because we're starting to look at so many other areas that are potentially out in the cloud, such as we're using Workday for HR, and the potential integrations that we even have from a cloud perspective, once we've got ServiceNow and the ITSM piece of the cloud. Those are, I think, major selling points over just the overall flexibility over what we had in the previous product.

At this point in time, it's interesting because a lot of what I'm seeing, there's a lot of momentum right now towards ServiceNow. It's one of those things amongst everyone, not just in the industry; a lot, all over the place. It's in a major growth mode. I'm not entirely sure they're going to see too many of the other products being able to keep up. It's one of those things; if you're looking at future-proofing yourself, and there's a lot of this, there are a lot of strategies for going with a cloud partner. I realize there are some cloud competitors who have started up out there with ServiceNow. I've heard them infrequently, but it's kind of like, "Do you want to go with the company that's got the most resources and the most money to put toward development of their product, or in something where everybody's focusing on?" You've got a large third-party contingent supporting the product and things of that nature, and more and more development going toward it all the time. Or, "Do you want to go with something where you're not going to get the benefit of that same thing?" I think right now it would be hard to go with anybody else.

Reporting

Incident

Configuration

Visual Task Boards

Scheduling

Evanios Operations

Easy integration

Customized Dashboard as per user requirement

Scheduling reports has decreased manual effort.

Integration is possible with almost all monitoring tools and auto-ticketing functions properly.

A duplicate ticket option should be enabled - this feature can help to take the same information from a close incident thus decreasing manual time.

4 years

No issues.

Excellent (9/10)

Excellent (9/10)

In my previous organisation we used LanDesk which used to have less options. Hence switched to ServiceNow.

In-house one

No others were evaluated.

ServiceNow is a really great platform. What I like about it is the integration capabilities. We use this a lot with our customers, integrating different systems with their suppliers, and that saves a lot of time. Besides this, the platform opens up a lot of possibilities. We mostly use the ITIL. Instant problem change is a great feature. The customer portal is also appreciated.

For example, we had one process of the customer when they had two ticketing systems. Their own, and their supplier's system, and they used to copy the tickets by hand. A person actually typed in the stuff in the other system, back and forth. That takes so much time. Now it's all integrated. There's no time delay, and they're much more efficient now.

With the ITSM solution, you kind of have chaos. You can really tackle that with the solution. You have standardized processes and you get rid of the chaos to be more organized. When you're more organized, the company gets more efficient and you get the job done. The system's more reliable, so the quality of the service increases with an IT service management solution.

I would like an IoT integration. At the hackathon there was a team working with Amazon buttons with a battery inside. You push it, and you will trigger a request. You can put it next to a coffee maker. If there's an issue, press it. Or integrate a whole different kind of sensor with ServiceNow. You can even more automate your process and your services.

Some processes could be a bit more detailed. For example, the change process. It was reworked in Helsinki, so that's a great thing. Maybe there they could bring a bit more. Also, the incident process was reworked. I really like these changes. That would be my advice. Go again over the process.

We've been using it for five years. We're currently on Geneva, but we're planning on going with the Helsinki release soon.

The point is, when you do heavy customization, it takes some time to upgrade. But that's not ServiceNow's fault, because sometimes you need a special feature, or something implemented in a special way, and they just need to keep track of that every time you upgrade. But usually it's not that complicated, just review it. The new features in Helsinki are great when you have this nice overview. You review the feature, then you call ServiceNow, and you're done. The rest works seamlessly.

There were performance issues, minor ones, with one customer. The rest is working really good.

It was quite complex, because I'm working with service providers. They have a customer site, and a company site, so there's domain separation, where you actually separate all the data. I had to put a lot of effort on the CMDB, but now they have a great solution. The correct SLAs, they just wake the technicians at night when the customer's really paying for it. It's really pre-one incident.

The time for go live is really short. You can get it up and running in a fast time compared to other solutions. That's definitely a plus.

I think you should have your processes sorted out before you start implementing, or at least make decisions. You can always improve your process afterward. But it's good, then you have a starting motion. Otherwise, it's hard. If you're not sure about your processes, then you either stick to the standard processes, or otherwise it's hard to start implementation.

Highly Customizable, Easy to integrate with third party applications, Configurable with little knowledge, Appealing UI, Automates processes.

By automating processes it has increased efficiency and productivity. As it was easy to understand customers easily adopted it.

A global search should be present OOB which can locate anything in the system like any piece of code or any sys id or any record so that we don't have to goto to each module for searching it.

More than 4 years.

No.

No. Very stable.

No.

Very prompt and efficient customer service.

Very good.

No.

It was straightforward and quite easy to deploy.

It has resulted in increase of efficiency which is our ROI.

Highly recommended.

ServiceNow gives you the opportunity to customize your portal according to your needs using the most recent frameworks such as bootstrap, AngularJS, jQuery, etc., or to simply code HTML tags or JavaScript. It contains some internal programming language, Glide, which is quite similar to normal JavaScript.

• Optimisation of service delivery across the supply chain.
• Better reliability and quality of service.
• Improved customer satisfaction and relationships.
• Our IT homepage improved how we order products internally, making it smooth.

The Project Management with Resource Management feature is an area with room for improvement. The timecard are not being considered when a resource is working on two projects and contains vacations or out of office days. The reports should be a lot better; maybe it could use SAP BusinessObjects, Tableau or QlikView in the background; that would be nice.

I rate customer service as high. The ServiceNow communities work quite well. There's a large of people with experience. They also publish a lot of content on youtube to bring out product features.

I rate technical support as high.

We previously used BMC ARS. We switched because it has helped to reduce operational IT costs by 30-50%.

PPS components such as Planning Console, Resource Workbench and the Visual Task Board are excellent add-ons to the OOTB lists and forms and provide a great way to add value to the Organization without having to opt for a point solution for each of these processes.

ServiceNow reduces drastically the time to value and it is possible to completely get rid of flat files such as spreadsheets and powerpoints in less than a month for any Organizational process.

ServiceNow offers Angular components that greatly enhance User Experience. Pages such as the Resource Workbench to allocate resource, Planning Console for Waterfall planning and Demand Workbench to prioritize demands all contribute to adding value to a ServiceNow implementation project. On the flip side, until very recently the overall UX experience was very poor as everything is either based on a form or a list. Hopefully with the release of Service Portal and as it evolves in future releases, web developers will have more and more flexibility to improve on the OOTB UI capabilities.

Deployment through Update Sets can be challenging at first but after some practice they become easy as a breeze.

Stability is assured by the Vendor. No issues found so far.

Easily scalable as the Vendor assumes availability at all times.

Very good. Quick response and very customer friendly.

Technical support hours can be negotiated with contract and with so many community resources most of the times it's not even needed to recur to the Vendor.

Setup requires someone who understands the default data model in order to quickly identify synergies between requirements and OOTB capabilities.

Licensing model is not easy to understand and is constantly evolving. For example, just recently ServiceNow changed the PPS licensing model (now Service Strategy) to distinguish between users who only perform assigned tasks (workers) and planners.

The speed of being able to do stuff. Once you know where to put your code, it's very fast to put it somewhere and have it running.

More publications about what plug-ins are available.

I've personally used it for about a year.

There's been very little downtime in the year we've had it. I think we've had one outage that was five minutes or so.

Product-wise, I think it's scalable. The pricing model is a little bit prohibitive for us.

They've been great. I haven't used them much in the year that I've done it. I've only had maybe two incidents logged, but they were great with them.

The community is good most of the time. People will answer questions so it's a pretty good community.

We just did the Fuji to Geneva, and there were a lot of issues. I think it was because we've done a lot of customizations on forms, adding things, and what-not that broke when we moved to Geneva. The other guys who have been there for longer have said it was pretty difficult in comparison to the other upgrades.

It's kind of preventing us from using it on other things because of the licensing model.

It's worth it, but have a good team around you to help you do it right. Having a team has been good to bounce ideas off of, especially when people have been using it in our organization for maybe eight or nine years. There's always someone who knows, "Oh don't do this," or "Do it that way."

I'm the unit manager of the network operations center so I'm a core user of the tool. I don't get involved in the development, deployment or support of it, but we get a lot of tickets in the network operations center. I think probably some of the best things the tool brings to us revolve around the ability to manage all of our work. The intake of the work, tracking it and helping it move through the different processes so tracking incidents, then times they turn into a problem that we have to follow up and come up with a root cause.

For me as the manager of the network operations center, it's mainly around being able to track our work, know who is working on what, what our work volume is, how it ties to the different services that we support.

The reporting is one piece that's a lot of interest to me in the network operations center. We don't have a ton of metrics today mainly because we haven't put the effort in that direction, but we want to. I poked around on the reporting a little bit and I went to a session [at Knowledge16] on performance analytics. I thought, gee this looks like what I'm after but we have yet to purchase that module. I don't know if we will or won't so I guess I don't have enough experience to say. I see the potential there.

I think it's bringing a lot of stuff that's been handled by a lot of different applications and a lot of different areas in one place. We grew up with a few different areas which had their own tools for a long time for ticketing and managing assets. Basically bringing it all into one place I think is very beneficial.

I would say there really isn't anything I found that I really dislike. Now the caveat to that statement is we've been going at the deployment for a while. Again, I'm the user, the consumer side of the tool. What I'm waiting and watching to see is, as these new modules roll out, as we implement change and knowledge base, I've got myself and my group, we've got a lot of work to do yet just to learn the tool as it is today. We haven't really gotten into it far enough to say, "Gee I really don't like this."

The sense I get just from some of the classes that I've taken where I've been poking around in some of the tools that we don't have yet, I do see there's definitely a learning curve involved. Now I look at it like there's a learning curve involved in any new tool you bring into your organization. I think the overall pain of the learning curve maybe less when you have a common tool like the ServiceNow. If I get over the learning curve for problem management, for example, I'm probably halfway there with change, incident and the rest of them. A lot of things you're going to learn and want are applicable together. I think overall the total learning curve will probably be less.

I haven't had any issues. As a matter of fact since we've been using it, I can't think of one time where it was unavailable or had an issue. I haven't seen that as an issue from an end user perspective. I have it up periodically. The folks in my unit have it up all the time to monitor the queues and I haven't heard any issues with it.

I really haven't been involved in that side of it, we're the development side. From an end user, I think just as I've watched them enable more modules, bring on more things, I haven't noticed any kinds of performance issues.

We used BMC Remedy for ticketing system. We never really had a CMDB as we had various databases that housed different information so BMC Remedy, is the main one that comes to mind that we used prior to ServiceNow, that we'll be sun setting. We actually had some in-house tools as well that we developed.

We did so to manage things like our change records and actually that really was the formal IT CMDB if you will. We had some home-grown tools as well that we're working on sun setting.

There's another group in our organization that's responsible for the purchasing decisions. One of the things I heard that was maybe of concern to me, is that we had our in-house system that we used to communicate to our end user groups around change. I have some concerns about the ability in ServiceNow and the capability to notify end users of changes. I think if I was not mistaken that's in part due to licencing. We have about two thousand IT people versus total of about sixty thousand employees.

I believe there was a licencing cost issue around if I want all those people to be able to subscribe to change notifications. I don't quite understand how that works fully but I get the sense that there was maybe some cost challenges with that. From an end user perspective and the network operations center, we make a lot of changes that have the potential impact, large geographical areas and try to figure out how do to notify our end users. That's what I don't really know yet, how that ServiceNow tool is going to help us do that. We're still trying to figure that piece out.

One piece of advice I would give you from my perspective is that if you're going to deploy it, make sure you put the appropriate amount of effort into training the end users. I think there is some complexity learning how to navigate it and I think for a lot of people having a document to follow is challenging sometimes. Make sure you put the appropriate amount of emphasis on training. I've been in IT for about 26 years, I've seen a lot of this stuff grow up in pieces.

It's filling a niche I think a lot of people have really, really wanted which is bringing a lot of this information into one central location. The various areas of IT can no longer operate in a vacuum, it has to operate as one large cohesive IT department that aligns with the business. I think a tool like this helps bring a lot of that stuff into one place.

The ability to get in there and create stuff without worrying about setting everything up first. I like that we can get in there and kind of start developing right away, we don't have to worry about getting instances set up, we don't have to worry about getting everything provisional, all the networking stuff done, just get up and go.

Everybody can access it, and that's great. They take care of security.

They seem to be answering a lot of our problems that we've been having in trying to control the development, trying to control our other developers, and it sounds like they're giving us that. I definitely want to see Scoped get built out more though, it's great that they've got the Scoped functionality but, I want to make sure that we're able to do all of the same things we're able to do in the global inside the Scoped applications as well.

I've been using ServiceNow for about three or four years, but I've really been developing in it for about two years.

We've never really had too many issues and anything we have had has been self-inflicted, so it's not ServiceNow's fault.

I don't even know that we've had too many issues with trying to scale anything, it comes right ready for everybody to access it in the company. The only thing I would say we've encountered, we've come up with our own creative ways to kind of prevent certain people from accessing things. It's really scalable, it comes ready to go for the whole enterprise.

I think they're pretty decent. Sometimes you have to finagle their help best to get the right answers. We've had to escalate some issues before but for the most part we've gotten everything taken care of.

It's pretty straightforward, and every now and then we have to go in and make some changes, but really it's not that big of a deal and it kind of helps us keep modernizing our stuff too, so not so bad.

• The way it can integrate with other applications.
• How it can be a central hub for anything we need to do
• The fact that it's cloud based. That's huge for us.

It'd be nice to maybe have some help features or some nice how to's to where if you need something, this is what you do. If something broke, this is what you do. Have that more readily available and more straightforward.

I've personally used it for about a year.

I haven't had any problems. No latency. No issues.

I believe so. We're going to use this as our central point for so many things.

Very knowledgeable and very quick. The questions that we've had to have, or issues that we've had, we've had them answered extremely quick. I'm very happy about that.

We're slowly integrating it. They're still using Heat for incident management. They had nothing for project intake, for onboarding, or service requests so we're bringing those on now as well.

Our initial setup was not the best. We had some issues with it with the company that implemented it for us. We're with a different company now and it has been just fantastic. They've taken us through the whole thing, they've helped us out and they've worked with us step by step.

I would highly recommend it. I would say first thing you need to do is sit down and figure out how you're going to start with it and then, where do you want to expand from. Obviously, you don't want every module to start with. Start off with what's your biggest need or what's the easiest to implement and then go from there.

The development aspects within it are valuable. Incident, change and problem. It's given us one pane of glass to look at a lot of stuff, which has opened a lot of eyes to our IT department.

I did some app training and and got to see Helsinki. It was a little buggy, but I realize it's the next thing coming out, so it was good. I like the direction they're going.

I've personally used it for a little over two years.

Everything that we've had has been stable. We haven't had really any issues or anything.

It's very scalable.

I'd say they're proactive. Any of the tickets I've had open with them, they've gotten back to me in a timely manner and taken care of things.

We were using something before that was supposedly an ITIL platform, IncidentMonitor. As we expanded and got bigger it just wasn't an enterprise solution that we were looking for, so we looked at ServiceNow, and I can't remember the name of the other one we looked at. ServiceNow by far was the one to go with.

I think because we were so new and not knowing what the tool could do we really didn't have anybody that knew much about the product. We brought in a third party, and they had some quick starts that we used to get us up and rolling.

If they're coming into it new and they don't have any experience with it, I would say that they need to find a third party that can help get that tool rolling quickly. I would say that we didn't know enough. We went with a company early on, that I had mentioned earlier, that we weren't a hundred percent satisfied with. We switched over to a different company now that we're using, and it's better. It's not perfect. I would say that you need to go and you need to find somebody that can help get you started. If it's not another company that you can look to, third party come in and help out.

I would say everything. A customer can call the service desk and the service desk can create the incident and set the incident task to whoever it has to go to and the change is a huge process in our system. In our company, we have the change process that are properly done, so going into ServiceNow it improved the process even more. The change, changed task, and under release, are in the same module. We have a ton of catalogs items we have put in and people have been using it. We do the tasks automatically through Workflow, so it works very well.

We also did the facility module when we went with the Eureka and facilities team is using it as well. They have tremendously improved their process because they have been doing handwriting before, so switching into ServiceNow they were able to make a lot of improvement.

I think that ServiceNow needs to think about implementing an enterprise solution for licensing because it's going to become too pricey and not sustainable from a corporate perspective. We are not using HR, BPM management, or DRC. I would like to have those and talk to a company at high levels so they can see better, and they can get into those modules as well.

For ServiceNow itself, they're doing more every year, even now, they're doing Android, iPhone and Watch, so they should keep doing more things every year.

I have been using ServiceNow since August 2014.

There was an outage at the ServiceNow data center servers, especially on the eastern site. I don't know about all the other data centers, but our data center recently had an outage for at least 15 minutes. Two weeks later we found out about it through some other call, not to the engineer and it was not notified anywhere on the system. I thought ServiceNow would have send out an e-mail or put something on the page saying that the ServiceNow in the data center is out.

I would say it's nicely done and we have been using it for our other processes and integrating with other companies as well.

They are doing very well. We have two process. One from the self-service page, the self service page, you can do automatically to the incident or they can call in to the service desk and they can do that manually for them.

We were using HP Service Manager before and even before that I think we had used Heat. I don't know whether there were any other competitors or not, as this was selected by the stakeholders in our company, so I don't know what they considered.

I would recommend it and I love this tool. Anything that I think of, the tool can do. The one thing that we were looking for was HR and procurement management. They were looking for the document management and red lines. You can do the documents attached to it, but they cannot do the document itself, like a template or something I believe they are doing the that in Helsinki.

To me, just the initial interface is very intuitive and user-friendly and I think it's just going to be yards ahead of what we've been doing previously. Since it's so intuitive, it's easy to use. In the middle of whatever you're doing, you can drill down or build reports or save your filters. I think it's going to save us a lot of time on building and people asking other people for information when they can get it themselves.

The integration between asset management and ticketing and having it all under one roof is going to help us become more efficient.

It's really too early for me to tell because it's such a vast difference in what we have already. I haven't run into anything yet that I would say needs to be improved. Again, we're just starting.

I'm not sure if they have the software-as-a-catalogue yet, as far as bringing in the software titles with all of the rules of engagement for the software licensing. Right now, the competition has it, so the tool that we have now it makes it a lot easier on the people running the software compliance because then they're not guessing at how the licensing works. Then they had somebody in the industry telling them exactly the right thing to do without trying to figure it out for themselves and perhaps making mistakes.

Too early to tell, but not that I'm aware of. That part is not really my area, but I haven't heard of any.

I have no idea. I suspect it's great, though.

We were using CA Service Desk. The learning curve is going to be a lot shorter. The interface is much more user-friendly and, again, the integration is much better.

It's going to be pretty complex, but it's because we've got data coming from a lot of different sources. From what I've seen on the imports, ServiceNow isn't going to be reason it's going to be complex. They're going to make it a lot easier.

We've brought in a third party.

For our company, it would be incident management with the ability to track and report on that. Showing trends and then tying that into problem management as well. Also completing the whole circle, so problem management and change management. Having one system of record that everything is all tied together and you can connect the dots all the way around through the lifecycle.

Being at the help desk, we see trends and incidence from which we can create a problem to track a larger issue because it's effecting more than one user or more than one location for our restaurants. From there, we run down root cause of what's actually causing this problem to happen. Then from that the developers will kick off change requests to permanently fix the problem. But if you don't have the incident management to replace or the ability to report and trend, then you never know that problem's happening because we have a really quick fix that we do all the time. So being able to see that trending and get ahead of the problems and get them out of the environment makes everyone's life easier.

From our perspective, it's the ability to customize it and provide the different platforms. A good example is that within our organization we have incident forms that are tailored to IT and we have incident forms that are tailored to other groups, like accounting supply chain. They're using the exact same incident form, but they're customizing the fields that show up based on their groups so that they get the experience and reporting they need out of the product, but we're all using one system of record and one form to do that in so we can report holistically.

The other part of that is from a customer and restaurant facing standpoint, we can build out those seamless pages, create custom portals for the restaurants, because obviously the IT view or the back end users view is not what a customer wants to experience. It lets us create that front end view for a customer to get what they need and still have that logic to the system for it to flow through and everything.

I think some of the areas for improvement are some of the features that get added sometimes and not a lot of help and resources get devoted to them. A good example is inside of my self-service portal, we use heavily utilizing the wizards that will actually walk users through a guided experience, asking questions, giving responses to lead them where they want to go because in the restaurant industry not everyone wants to fill out forms. They just want to be led by the hand. They're hired to run restaurants, not run computers. So, there's very little documentation on how to use them and how to build them. It's kind of one of the features that got put in but never really expounded upon because it's not been used a lot. So, we really taught ourselves how to use them.

The other one would be what I'm looking at now which is coaching loops. Very little documentation. Very little understanding of how it works. Again, learning it on my own because the book explains this is kind of the fields and what they do, but very little as far as actually using it as available. I would say sometimes they're great features, and they're great additions, but if there's not a lot of user adoption, then not a lot of documentation gets written for them.

We've been on ServiceNow for about four and a half, almost five years, and we've just upgraded to Geneva.

I think the only issue we've had is our recent upgrade to Geneva went a little wonky. But I think that was partially our fault. We had gotten a little bit behind on patching Fuji and then jumped to Geneva Patch 5. I think there was items missed. Even though it should have been cumulative, I think we had some items that were missed in there.

The other issue we had is when we deployed ServiceNow, we started with domain separation. Mostly because the consulting company we used said that's the only way to do it. It probably shouldn't have been done, but that's not a reflection of the product as much as the consultants we used at the time.

We used Altiris. Maintaining Altiris servers was getting very expensive. They were hosted locally. We had a very old version of Altiris. We never kept up with the new version, so it never went to the cloud. So very old, very hard to maintain. The admin we had at the time was retiring. But probably the biggest standpoint was how limited Altiris was. You really could not customize it. If you wanted to build reporting, you had to have a sequel admin do it for you because there was no user interface for reporting. It was the system sped out the sequel queries that it was told to do, but you had to write them in sequel. So, it was not very user friendly.

I think in some ways we probably bit off more than we should have chewed, but we needed the product to replace Altiris. We had to fill that gap because of everything it did. From a stability standpoint, it was probably on the verge of collapse. We had to put a product in place to take it's place.

We worked with ServiceNow directly now, but during the implementation, we found a third party to do it for us. We were involved, but we also relied heavily on that third party consultant because Altiris had been the only thing we knew for so long that this was a complete change. It was our huge step forward.

Don't look at ServiceNow as what it can do for whatever department you're in, but try to get some buy in higher up in the organization because the more foundation and different groups you can get into ServiceNow at the beginning, the easier it is for the adoption. It really can become something for the entire organization. Getting that buy in from the beginning helps it grow a little faster.

If you've got 5 different groups that will be in it from the beginning, then some of the choices you're going to make are going to be a little bit different and they're going to be a little more future planned than, "I just need this for me". So, it's probably the biggest advice I can give is try to plan for the future.

I've seen other products. I've seen some of the stuff that they can do. Really haven't seen one that can, at least in my mind, replace our ServiceNow for everything that we've put into it, everything that we've done. It would be a very hard thing to do.

I would say it's that it's web based, relatively open, well integrated into different environment and OSN independent.

I would say database or data visibility. In fact, I think for me, I'm going for the physical side, most of the people like to access data without any constraints. We're in ServiceNow, it's not very easy to access the data on a very simple way. That would be a very good improvement, and you need some specific tools to access data or reporting. Sometimes it's not enough and that's the point.

I've used it for three years now. Partly as a developer and partly consulting with user groups.

I would say yes. Sometime some delay of latency but otherwise it is very stable.

We will see in the future but I think that Helsinki will be a very great improvement for us.

I have nothing to say about support. It's just nice.

We used BMC Remedy, and it was slightly different but we went for ServiceNow because it is more user oriented.

Prepare a very good Service Catalog first. Then you have a very good base to work on and then trying to adapt the interface to the user to the very basic user because it's the main problem we have to face too.

ServiceNow is such a broad framework that you can basically touch upon any improvement that you want to do in your company. Whether it's financial, healthcare or HR related. I think you can use your imagination to build anything that you want to improve. I think that's the greatest power of ServiceNow - it's basically a generic optimization too.

What I really like is that it's going a bit away from purely IT but it allows you to compose a service catalog or an asset database. That can be the basis of purchasing, request performance or validation. For example for healthcare, you load all the assets of technical healthcare systems into ACNB database which can be used to find out which hospitals have an MRI machine available.

You can go in all kinds of directions and I think that's what is most powerful. They use mechanisms to attract people to the system. I think the user experience is improving so fast, they use the example a system of record and system of engagement. I think it's exactly that. It attracts people that normally wouldn't have so much interest in a system like this but because it communicates a bit like WhatsApp it appeals much more to what they like to do. Then I think the biggest step of implementing such things is not the imagination of knowing what to design, what to develop but how to implement it in an organization. I think that's the biggest step, basically changing your organization to adapt to the new functionality or the new way of working you want to introduce. I think that for companies it's the most difficult aspect.

Architects and solution designers can come up with the greatest things but more complex organizations cannot just be blended into an ideal model. There's always contradicting stakeholders especially in the field of service management. I'm doing an assignment with a large bank and their service management belongs the service management department. The IT company that does the nominal incident resolution for us feel responsible for service management. We have a security and compliance department who feels responsible for service management. We have a functional support department that feels responsible for service management. Everybody has an opinion on service management, everybody has an opinion on CMDB. If you want to change something with a great idea, they have to get all those people on board to get the decision made and then to have it implemented. I think that is the tricky bit and that's what you don't hear all the time.

Well the funny thing is that we develop based on ServiceNow and you see a lot of apps being made. I think whenever you see shortfalls or improvement opportunities for ServiceNow that are being built by third party companies, the next release of ServiceNow includes it all. There must be aspects that are currently not there in ServiceNow and my bet is that it will be there next year. That's difficult for development guys like us but on the other hand it makes the product stronger all the time.

What I'd like to see is the fact that Performance Analytics should be a stand-alone reporting tool, and allow you to drag and drop within the data cubes or the dimensions in the data model. Let's say I want this on the y-axis and I want this on the x or I want this in this in this kind of graph. You can throw around with the fields and immediately you see the graphs being populated. I think from a customer point of view, they should be able to be in the power to have their idea created right there on the spot and not being dependent on an implementer who comes and does this consulting for them. I saw good examples in BMC which I haven't seen on Performance Analytics but they just bought the products, they're just expanding on that. What I see is that companies sometimes use an external tool for presenting dashboards to customers, like Numerify or Grafana or this 3rd-party dashboarding solutions. I think it's a waste if ServiceNow is not able to keep those customers on-board.

I think ServiceNow can improve more towards the customer to allow them to do that themselves. If they implemented some frameworking, set it up for you and then say, "Okay, this is what you can do and this is the freedom you'll get." Then you can throw or you can toss around with the data in any way you would like.

On the platform, on the framework called ServiceNow there's all kinds of interacting systems like SAP and Oracle. I think what you see is that maybe SAP will not be needed that much anymore in five years from now because a lot of functionality that a company needs is offered through the platform called ServiceNow.

I don't know where that's going to end because at some point ServiceNow will become a marlock and people will turn away from a 'one solution fits all' and go more into the niches again. I don't know where it's going to end. Until now I think it looks very promising and yeah, I think very much appealing to most customers.

We have used it only for a couple of months because we're a start-up. Personally, I've used it a little over a year.

One of our partners is the technical guy, he's developing now on the development instance.

The only thing I can come up with is the fact that we ordered an instance with domain separation or activated that wasn't there from the scratch. We had to raise an incidence and to get it resolved and stuff. You know that it takes you one or two weeks and then everything is done and then it's passed to you.

We used a solution from HP.

Out-of-the-box stuff is very easy to deploy but when you have specific demands then maybe of course it is more complex. For us it was quite easy because we had a developer instance already so we developed most of our products in that instance. We couldn't get stuff like the domain separation completely functionally the way we wanted it. We could develop already, so when we purchased our instance I think it took us 2 - 3 weeks to get everything up and running.

I would definitely advise you to transition into ServiceNow because I've seen comparisons with the BMC Projects which is a lot more expensive. I haven't seen any functionality that I would really like except maybe for some Performance Analytics functionality that is more user friendly than what I saw.

I think the most valuable feature is just the ability to take the whole organization and put it in one place. Traditionally, my background has been in service desk, and so someone who call with a problem and we would deal with it. If it was outside of that scope, it was outside of our system, and so we had to go to someone else's tracking system or someone else's system of record. With ServiceNow, all of a sudden if someone calls us with a facilities request, we don't have to just palm them off and say, "Call this number." We can go into the facilities app and say, "Oh, here's how you get your work order done. Here's how you handle this type of request." It just enabled us to see the whole organization as a single organization, which, especially for higher ed and places like that, just doesn't happen. Everybody has their own little silos, and this gave us a chance to unify that.

Traditionally people saw different facets of IT as different areas of responsibility, so incidents were handled by one group, and problems were handled by another, but they never really called them that. They just called them "tickets," or they called them "emergencies," or they called them whatever they did, and so looking at ITSM, you can look at sort of a workflow of a thing, and so enough incidents becomes a problem, and problems need change, and that sort of thing, and so for us, it was not just about, "We need a better way to track stuff," but it was, "We need a better way to see how that workflow works so that people other than just the folks in the trenches doing the work can see how that works and see how the organization works together," so again, for us, it was about unification. It was about seeing that it was everybody's problem, and not just whoever was holding the baton at a certain time.

The biggest hassle we have for ServiceNow has been licensing. We have a lot of student workers. When you have cheap labor that's right at your doorstep, you can't turn them down, and so we have a lot of functions at the university, not just in service desk, but also in housing and in customer support, that is handled by student workers that don't work all the time. They work ten hours a week, or they work five hours a week, but they consume the same type of license as an eighty-hour-week employee, and because of that, in some departments, it's prohibitively expensive to use ServiceNow, because if you have a hundred student workers that are only working ten hours a week, you have to pay for a hundred idle licenses, and that can be a huge speed bump into getting them to adopt it, whereas with our other platforms it was concurrent licensing, and we could just buy a bucket of licenses and hand them out.

There are some initiatives to improve that, but for right now, that's still a big stumbling block for us is, that's really stopping our momentum is, we go to a department, we give them a great pitch, and they ask for the price, and it really is a big issue.

We went live just over a year ago, and we had a fairly quick implementation period, so we had only used it for a few months prior to that, as far as building it, and that sort of thing, so just under two years.

In fact, it solved a lot of those issues for us, because our Remedy implementation was all on-prem, so we had database servers we had to update, we had Tomcat servers. We had every other kind of thing, and not enough staff to run them, and so it really was an effort whenever we had to bring a service outage back that we didn't know sort of what was happening. Same thing with upgrades. You had to coordinate several people, and it was a lot of effort, whereas now it's literally just, "Hey, we need to do a patch this weekend, so let change know that we're doing a patch," and in the morning the patch would be there, and so from our standpoint, that was really the biggest thing, is that we haven't seen the issues now that we saw previously. As far as implementation, uptime, we really haven't had any problems.

We used BMC's Remedy product, but it was traditionally call tracking, and so it really didn't unify it under any sort of framework. It was just call tracking and knowledge, and so ServiceNow gave us an opportunity to see it, just to open the world of ITSM up, we hadn't been exposed to before, and see that you could actually bring all that stuff together in one place and resolve it more efficiently.

The technical aspects of it were fairly straightforward. We knew we wanted to change, and so never let a good crisis go unused, and so we knew we were changing products, and we wanted to change philosophies too, so we didn't spend a lot of time making ServiceNow look like Remedy, and that helped out, but what it also meant is that we hit a lot of resistance from people that had to move towards that new product, that it didn't look like the old stuff, and so from a technical standpoint, I had a top-notch architect, and he came in and he knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew how he wanted to do it, and so when we went to the customers, that was really the issue is, they wanted more of a vote, they wanted it to look like their view of how it looked, so technically? No, very easy. Politically, sort of new process, sort of point of view, it was a little bit harder, but the technical aspect's very easy to handle.

I would have them analyze their business and see if they had the drive to move to a system like ServiceNow. ServiceNow was a huge jump for us because it was seeing the world differently, and some universities, particularly smaller ones, don't have the willpower to make that jump, and so what I would tell them is, "There is a lot of potential here, and if you're ready for it, grab it with both hands, and just do it, but if you're not, back off." I mean, they have the ServiceNow Express that's sort of a light way to get into the system, but I think my advice would be, to do your due diligence. Make sure that your organization is invested, and it's not just a couple of people who want to buy a new package, and when you're ready, go for it. There's a huge community that can back you up, and there's a lot of support that you can get, but if you're not, then don't waste your time and everybody else's moving to a system that you might not be ready for.

It all goes back to potential that it is a platform. It is not just, "Here are your round pegs, and here's our square hole. Do the best you can." It's really, it's got the potential to do a lot of good. There are some things that I have issues with because I don't think higher education is a demographic that ServiceNow is really comfortable with yet, and so there are problems there that they don't realize, like the student thing.

I think once they get the higher ed stuff more up to speed, and they've got SIGs now, and they've got panels, and that sort of thing, so I think they're getting there, but for right now, it's not really a demographic they focused on, and so I'd like for them to pay more attention to that.

It's all about the level of usefulness ServiceNow brings to IT. They all affect legacy systems, so if you compare it with other tools, the edge which ServiceNow was there from day one. Usability, application customizations and ease of building your own product within the tool was a very positive edge for ServiceNow to be leaps and bounds beyond the market tools.

We have done multiple implementations across various industry structures, industry verticals like manufacturing, automobiles, healthcare, aerospace, and federal government implementations. All these implementations are different in its each unique way based on how many users use it, the locations of those users and all that. What I'm trying to say is even if there are multiple customizations, the number of users are different, we've never seen any stability issues compared to other industry leading tools. It's pretty stable.

Definitely discovery software and management. Then talk about CMDB, how they arrange all those CMDB tables. Those are a few areas of improvement that they can make better.

I've been using ServiceNow for the past six years. From the initial days where they were on a on-premise implementation, I've been using ServiceNow products.

8/10 - because when you're talking about scalability there are a lot of factors. You're talking about user scalability, we're talking about application scalability, talking about what ServiceNow can achieve. They are very good with custom applications, building capability, and the ability to maintain them. The only thing is once you kind of get into that part, then when you do upgrades you're probably going to need to work on those custom applications to make sure everything works fine. Apart from that, they're a pretty robust and scalable platform for workload.

They're responsive. Knowledgeable - it's kind of questionable because the problem they are also facing is expanding leaps and bounds. Everybody wants to get on the ServiceNow bandwagon. They're probably also having issues with resourcing and training those people to kind of address the right questions and all that. Each and every problem is unique so there's a need to find a senior resource and assign the ticket. The whole addressing duration, issue disintegration, would definitely take longer in case of your level one is not so equipped. That's what I observed.

It's straightforward.

It's serving our end-user community, making it simple for them to order products, get service from our incident help desk, and perhaps even helping everyone across the globe because we have to stay connected somehow, and ServiceNow does that for us.

We've just launched the visual task boards in the last year, so we're still learning how to do that effectively. Right now, we're trying to do a comparison of what we do with our internal chat and using the chat inside ServiceNow, so a lot of things that we're still learning, and we're trying to break ground so to speak, so that we can get better.

I think I want to focus in on our assets. We do many things for studios, and internally, we use a lot of hardware, so we want to be able to find and understand where our assets sit. If there's a breakdown in communication, how do we service that? We've recently launched with one of the certified partners. How we do a better job in tracking those assets once it comes on location, and then it gets into the inventory. That's the key piece. It's how do we manage those assets, manage the cost, manage where they are, and make sure people have access to that equipment.

Maybe cost in one sense because when you make that investment from the other side of it, you're looking at the cost, but we've been having that ongoing debate. Empty glass could be your cost, but the full glass or maybe half full, or half empty. If it's half full, that means you're getting great things out of it. If it's half empty, you're so worried about the cost. Where are you going to trim. We're going down the path of, "How do we shape our roadmap so that we understand what that investment is going to do for us?" We're using the Champions Enablement Tool to help us chart that out. We have our own internal tool, and there's a lot of similarities, but I think what we want to do is just channel it the way ServiceNow is intending it to.

We've been on it since Calgary, so we were early adopters. We're currently on Fuji. We will probably move to Geneva probably in the fall.

Recently, we've been working with the support because they've been notifying us that there are certain things that may be slowing down our system. Right away, they've advised us that they have that ability to transition us seamlessly and to help us with our connectivity. There are some complaints internally still that we're trying to wade through, but overall we've been quite happy with it. Connectivity for the most part has been very good.

It's tremendous. Just recently, we rolled out the GRC module. It was specific to one of our security teams. At the moment, it was just to help them with their auditing, how they manage their compliance. Now, the part of the business has gotten wind that this is out there. It was demoed. Now, people are coming to us in that sense.

The Service Catalog continues to grow over a hundred service catalog forms, and people want to get rid of the old email in our office, department envelopes, the email, and the shoulder tapping. Now, we're able to centralize them through the portal. In fact, that's another thing, the portal that we have. We had user issues with the community portal on Eureka.

It was scattered. It was decentralized, so people in their own locations were tracking a certain way or doing things a certain way. Some people had barcoding systems and scanned assets, while other locations were just eyeballing it and logging it onto spreadsheets. We knew there's a problem, and just like the Chief Product Officer is saying, you want to automate where you can, and this is where we want to go.

We went out to go get a certified partner's product and cross-views, and they've helped us really just make it look and feel more friendly than when now you look at Helsinki, it's like right in alignment of where we are today and where we want to continue to go, so those are the other things that we have to weigh out.

I wasn't part of that implementation team. I came in to really get the program together because we had our enterprise architect team implement it. However, I think the guys had fun implementing it because they were looking forward to actually getting it in place, start using it, and start deploying it. 

Upgrades through the years have been pretty tough. We didn't get the sandbox right away, so it made hard on our users where we have to do all the testing and make sure we understand the differences between out of the cloud versus what we did with custom development. That took just a little bit longer in analysis and testing implementation.

First question I would ask is, "What are you waiting for? You've described to me all your problems that you're having. You're decentralized. You're disparate. You have all these things that are hanging out there. You don't have a way to communicate essentially through people. Come on board."

I took the governance class. It was a day and a half, and I sat at a table with people that had the same problems. We had a new implementation in the two months prior. We have someone that's on a competitor's application, and they've already made the decision to come in ServiceNow, but it took the management team to say, "Hey, we need to do this. We got to get better at what we're doing." Really, it's all practical in the sense of filling the need, and it's making it simple not only for the end-user, but if you saw the key note today, the backend where the developers and the systems. It's going to be really helpful for everyone.

It's right from our own internal processes, and matching staffing needs, and meeting the customers' needs, and then also ServiceNow coming in where cost has to be helpful to us. We know the platform is there.

The platform as a service and the capability to build our own custom apps. Also, the built in work flow engine as we're able to create our own work flows, but that the engine is already there and it speeds application development.

We are using ServiceNow to replace some applications on systems that we're hoping to be able to retire. It's helpful to be able to get new applications up and going quickly, and the work flow engine helps a lot with that.

Using it as our ITSM solution, it has helped us to move a lot of our different processes onto the same platform, which helps with reporting and tracking and that sort of thing.

We still have some issues with some of our ITIL users, like some things aren't as intuitive as they could be. Related to being able to see things, like what tasks are assigned to them. Service Catalog and request fulfilment is the main module we use right now, or effects the most people, and so the learning curve for some of our ITIL users is a little higher than we would like in some cases.

We have had some issues over time. I think at times, they've ramped us up or given us more processing power. A few times we've had outages lately here too. Sometimes it does seem slow. We've kind of learned not to bring up a list with a thousand items in it. Sometimes there's something that you run that you expect to get a response in a couple seconds and the counter counts up to 45 seconds before you get your response back, so there's certainly some issues. We've seen a few bugs, but no show stoppers.

We're on the small side of ServiceNow installations. It's just for our plant, so it's not like our whole operation. So, we haven't had any scaleability issues other than we've seen some latency sometimes. I don't know how much of that might have been related to needing to scale up a little bit.

We had a custom Lotus Notes database that we were using for request fulfilment before, but some of the other pieces that ServiceNow fills in we had various solutions for. We switched because ServiceNow gives us more capabilities as far as giving us one platform to be able to have a lot of our systems on and it has a lot of functionality there just out of the box. A lot of plug-ins you can just turn on and have some functionality, which of course, we want to customize. But, being able to roll out something like that so quickly helps.

The initial implementation did take a while. It was fairly complex. We engaged ServiceNow to help us with that. Our ServiceNow also engaged a business partner to help us with roll out initially. Going through that process did take a while, but we had the workshops and training in place to help make that easier.

It was through ServiceNow, but they were busy at the time, so we had a ServiceNow project manager. To help, ServiceNow also brought in a third party and the third party was stronger than our ServiceNow program manager or project manager was, and wasn't nearly as strong as the business partner was.

ServiceNow is not cheap, especially as we continue to pay for it year after year, but it is helping us be more efficient from the perspective of taking less time to make sure that our requests are fulfilled and to bring out new features and functionality.

It would help to know more about a specific situation to give advice, but it is nice that there's a decent sized ServiceNow community and Wiki that you can find what you need. If you see a demo or see some of what ServiceNow can do, it's certainly worth looking into. However, to give more specific advice, I'd need to know more.

I think there's some things about that that ServiceNow could have implemented better, but the software in general is good and solid.

There's pretty much nothing that I have found yet that I couldn't accomplish within ServiceNow if I wanted to. I think for us, we tried several times to implement a CMDB, a configuration management database, and it failed for various reasons. With ServiceNow, we were able to finally do that. My boss refers to that as the pink unicorn, the mythical creature that did not exist.

We finally made that happen with ServiceNow. I feel that CMDB is actually my license plate.

I think historically we have had a real warrior spirit. We would get in there and do it and sometimes that meant we would write something in house. I think that we would invest a whole lot of time on something, and we would get real attached to it. Then the next thing you knew, you blinked your eyes, and we were behind the times. I think that we've made a giant leap or two in the last year, year and a half or so, that we've been using ServiceNow, that I've been involved with.

Now we have invested the time in the CMDB. We've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things. We moved from Eureka to Geneva and now we've got this whole fresh look and all these new features. We're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do.

There's some platform code that is compiled and its Java code on the server side. There's no documented API on what the functions and properties are of that code, and we're not able to reflect that code to get it to make our own API. I think some of the platform devs have met with me in the developer hub and said that they are working to provide that because they can see why we'd want it. I'm excited to hear that that gap will get closed soon.

Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the lay out in the UI. Like moving a field label from the left to underneath. If you have 30 items on a page, or more, that's going to offset everything. Unnecessary moves and then unnecessary moves back, stuff like that.

It's pretty solid. I think that on our dashboard it says 99.8% availability. Now a lot of my customers in the service desk that do our support line, over the phone or through chat, they're telling me that the CMDB look up for config items on the incoming incidents that they're starting, is way faster in Geneva. They've set it, set it, and reset it. It wasn't just a first impression. It's a lasting, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." They sent a special email. We don't normally have people that are raving fans of anything you provide tool wise. We have our customers who are usually raving fans on our airlines. This was kind of surprising to hear.

We add users constantly. We on-board people and they are automatically added. We have a portal that's internal for our users that don't need to do changer class but they do need to request things in the catalog so those people are able to log in and request stuff.

We didn't successfully implement a CMDB. I think different work groups were very siloed and they had the problem of, "Where's our stuff?" They each solved that problem on their own because there was no centralized management database. Some people used spreadsheets. Some people used Wiki Documents or Wiki Documents with spreadsheets in them. Other people just had it in their heads and like, "We'll go ask Jim or go ask Bob. Oh, Bob left. I'm sorry. Go ask Tim. Maybe Bob told Tim before he left." It was like that. What we were able to do was use this as the first product that actually worked. We did try a few other products but we weren't able to get that off the ground. I don't know if that really speaks to those products or if it was the lack of support that we had from our leadership to get it done. I wasn't involved so I don't remember who it was, but I don't believe they were home-grown.

We used a tiered approach. We did like five or six release cycles to get to where we are. We started with CMDB and change management at the same time and I think that that really worked well. When we were working in Remedy, our CMDB only kind of had Oracle database names and host names. Windows or Linux host names and that's it. It was pretty flat and people were used to it and it wasn't a whole lot of information to ask people to put in their change request. When we came over, we were able to stand up change and people were satisfied with just having the host names, which was fairly simple. Then we were able to do kind of a crawl, walk, run, run with scissors sort of thing. I think that it went well.

Come to a user group meeting and we'd love to connect, meet and show you what we've done and talk about where you're at and give you some feedback and advice about what worked, what didn't work, what we thought might work better.

As a platform approach I would say I really like this vision of saying ServiceNow is an application platform now as a service where we can build any application we want to so we have some applications on the baseline like in sales management, like change management, now customer services, like security operation. If we need to build other applications we can do it, the same way if we want to modify an application, we can do it as long as we follow the base practices.

It's something really nice to do with ServiceNow because all legacy products when you were trying to do something a little bit on the side, it didn't work anymore and was very out of grade. Here, with our customers it's actually nice to upgrade ServiceNow.

It's like when you work on science, you say, when I answer one question, I have 10 other questions rising up. I see the same thing with ServiceNow. When something is added on ServiceNow on the platform, then you have 10 more things to do because you have to improve again and again and again. Here what could we do? They probably have a lot of things to do with IOT. We can always improve a lot of things about how we work between citizen developers and professional developers.

I am a professional developer so I know about Javascript, about coding, about scripting, technical stuff, but need as well to have people who don't anything about it would just and test it by their business side of the things. I want to engage them more and more to do things, to start doing things and when they are stuck with something, they just say, "Okay, David, please come to us, please help us with this thing. Please finish up the polish part," and then we arrive. Those are the things I would like to improve to engage more and more and more the citizen developers.

I started using it in December 2011.

I think we've got one customer who had an outage once, or maybe twice. One was a mistake we did on an integration and not the fault of ServiceNow. Second one is that the personnel forgot to change some certificates, so the instance was working perfectly, but the customer said, "I have an outage here and why?" We looked at it and we say, "Did you do your work here?" "Oh shit! I have to do it now." Yeah, extremely nice. I never had any issue with ServiceNow.

We go through the smallest customers, probably have something like 30 people and the biggest ones probably have thousands of people using ServiceNow everyday.

It's working very nicely, with scalability. Again, scalability with number of people, but also different teams working on ServiceNow, different processes, different countries. You can work with people all over the world together because ServiceNow won't stop working at 9:00 in the evening for European time.

Extremely good. The latest incident I have registered on high support was last week and maybe it was extremely complex, extremely technical, but after maybe one hour or two hours they came back with an answer saying, "Yeah, David, please read the documentation because it explains there that what you're trying to do is not actually possible." They provides all the answers and explanation why it's not really good to do it.

It's different for each company because if you are already quite mature with your processes, if you have good communication on your team, if you are obvious approach of collaborating between people, it's extremely easy. It can take just weeks to do it. On the other side, if you had legacy processes, you customized the previous tools and if you don't have this collaboration approach with the different teams and if everyone says, "I know what I need. I need this and only this feature and I can't listen to you if you tell me otherwise."

In that case, it might take more time, not because of ServiceNow but because we need a chance to culture the company. We need to have a culture shift on the company to be able to go to the right direction on ServiceNow. Communication, marketing, intel or involvement, engagement with people. That's extremely important to do.

If you need more time to do, for example, user acceptance testing, if you say, "Well I'm not secure as a customer to go live now." "Okay, let's take one more week, two more weeks to test. We probably won't do anything, any new developments, just a sync," but at least you will be sure that your users know ServiceNow, they are ready for go live and will be smooth. That's the most important. You go live when it's smooth, and not when it will be hectic.

I have customers who use HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy or CA. Personally, I tried in 2011, I have tried to work on BMC Remedy for maybe two months. I didn't learn that much. When I had the opportunity to go on ServiceNow, I said, "Yes, let's try." It was very nice and I have also spent maybe two days on HP Service Manager and that was the two most boring days of my life.

Yeah, the only thing we have to say with customers who already have some product today, especially in ITSM, is don't implement what you have from BMC or HP in ServiceNow. When you do ServiceNow, you do the ServiceNow way, not the BMC or not the HP way. That's extremely important because that's where you can end up with something extremely complex, not only for the platform. The platform can manage it, the platform don't care. Technically it's possible. For the people, for the users, for the end users for the fulfillers, you want to do something simple.

For example, for one customer, a small customer like one Android people IT guys, small customer. They had on instant management they had three Android categories. When you do some ServiceNow implementations, the first implementation step, you have to review your processes and review the requirements. Be sure you have the right things in place and not the things you don't need. Yeah. I think if I have say three words about a good ServiceNow implementation, it's all about upgradabiity, because you have to upgrade every six months or every year so you need to think about the upgradability of your platform. You have to think about the performance and you have to think about the value.

If you request anything and if you are a customer and you ask me anything to me, I will tell you what is the justification. If you don't have any justification, I will tell you, "Well, I'm sorry. I can't do it." I'll go to the CS person, and the they will say, I want this feature and I will say, "Okay. You are the customer, I do whatever you need, but above that, you need a justification." That's extremely important.

I use ServiceNow for analytics, but my team uses it for incident management. Those are the two most valuable things that we use it for.

I'd like to see improvement in their mobile space just because that's certainly my priority. I'll also like to see improvements more in their reporting in analytics still. I think they're getting there, but I'd like to see a little bit more from what they have right now.

We've been using ServiceNow for two years.

Perhaps we only had one issue that I can remember that we had a downtime, but other than that it's been very stable and very consistent.

It's still to be determined. In fact, I need to find out if it scales specifically for mobile devices. We have thousands and thousands of mobile devices out there around the world, and so we're trying to see if we can implement ServiceNow to scale to that number.

It was implemented by our engineering group, so my supports go straight to them. My understanding is that our solutions manager owns the product. My understanding is that he gets good support from ServiceNow, but direct support from ServiceNow, I don't directly do that. I go through our engineering group for that.

We were using HPE Service Management, but it was cumbersome. It was really not user-friendly. ServiceNow helped us, plus added value of workflow. We use a lot of workflow as well. We use that. That was the greatest value for that.

I didn't set it up for our organization, or I think my team didn't set it up, but for our instance for our group, it was seamless. The migration of data has been seamless for us as well. At least, that was our experience in our department. There's multiple departments, it's my organization. The data, the which one was the biggest one, transitioning from the old HPSM to the ServiceNow has been consistent and very good.

I recommend the product and I think there's potential for it. For the features that we have now, it's been day and night difference from what we've had.

I think realistically, it helped us better our processes. It forced us into adopting best practices. We were in a bit of a tech island, and so we kind of do our own thing. To get everyone in the same system, behaving the same way, looking at work the same way, it helped bring everyone on the same page and to adopt better ITIL practices.

We're a few generations back, we're on Eureka. We've had some vendors initially help us out. We've been through about four different vendors over the three and a half years. Some of that code has been problematic for us. We're looking to get to the Geneva release. A lot of this social type computing is really interesting to us.

I'm going to a Hackathon today, and I'm looking at a "Like" feature for managers. Often in IT, we're not front and center of projects, we don't get the spotlight. When we do things that keep the system up and running for the users, no one sees that. We want to say, "Well we're doing the work in the system." Our managers can go look at that, like it, high five, that kind of thing. We're looking at that kind of Facebook style, or social media style, view into their work and actually interesting to deep diving into the data and showing what our stats are like.

We just did our three year renewal in January so about three and a half years from implementation to production.

We've never had it go down or connect. Most times people say ServiceNow is down, it's because our network isn't available, so it's typically not us. You can flip the WiFi on your phone and say, "Okay, that's not ServiceNow." It's been really good.

We've been pretty consistent from day one. We've used more and more modules, and as people are getting more comfortable with the platform, we're trying to tie more functionality into it, but it's been reasonable for what we're doing.

It's pretty good. I can say that for some things, obviously you can't know everything and we can't find everything, but they've been doing better and better with that. Usually, when I do ask a question, they're pretty good at saying, "Okay, well here's where to go," or, "Okay, that's legitimate. Here's how to solve it." It's usually within a week or two that our issues can be resolved. If they're not critical, it's reasonable for us.

There's a lot there, it's like Excel. You can go in any which direction and you got two different ways to do it or multiple ways of doing things. It was a steep learning curve for us. We went through a number of vendors until we were able to fish on our own. Now we can go to specific people and then get those targeted information. It's been really good for us to have the user groups, local user groups, the snugs, and pick the brains of other companies who are having the same challenges or working on the same projects we are. Then we can collaborate a little bit and make sure that we're doing what makes sense. It's not just us in our own little sandbox.

Definitely understand a bit about ITIL best practice and what that is. We had a gentleman come in about three months before ServiceNow was brought in. He actually ran a mock help desk scenario with business asking things and with the knowledge base being put in typical back end of the level two support. We played the game several times, reorienting where all the knowledge is, where their work was done, and all of a sudden, I had a bird's eye view of how work should be done. As we were implementing ServiceNow, all the decisions and all the modules we put in place laid out to support that foundation that we'd seen. Whereas our initial approach was let's just put in there blank for like all the systems that we have. We wouldn't have leveraged a lot the best practices and things that we'd seen in the game that would've really helped us out. We would've had to rebuild it after the fact. Really understanding, see where you want to be and then build the tool up from there.

The new developer tools with Geneva have been the most valuable so far. The community is really good too. There's not a lot of tools that I've been an administrator of where the community really helps out like ServiceNow’s does.

I'm not sure about additional features because really, if you need something, you can build it in ServiceNow so that's pretty neat in itself. Working out some of the things that people might have headaches about and for access to certain things in the workflow, like the delivery time and being able to set that dynamically on a request item would be nice. As far as new features, it looks like they're going the right direction. They have ideas that I haven't even thought of.

I've used it for a little over a year.

It has. With the new update in Geneva, there's a few snags with the presence, but they're getting that ironed out. As far as up-time goes, it's always been available.

We haven't needed to scale yet and right now our licenses aren't size-based as far as storage-based goes. I haven't really seen a need to scale at the moment.

Very good. I've worked with other vendors in the past that haven't been nearly as good as ServiceNow's, like CA technologies and SolarWinds. ServiceNow is way better.

I previously used CA UIM. CA didn't really know what was going on and a lot of the stuff they promised was really not working properly. They got us in the contract, though, so it's too late.

I wasn't at the company when the initial setup took place, so I can't really speak on that. As far as upgrades go, it's pretty straightforward. Doesn't take too long and generally goes smoothly.

We will eventually upgrade to Helsinki. I guess we can do it now if we wanted, but we just switched everybody from Fuji to Geneva and getting everybody used to that. The UI hasn't changed a whole lot, but one of the sessions coming up [at Knowledge 16] is the Helsinki features. I'm going to take a look and decide from there whether we should push it quicker or not.

I'd tell them to stay out of the box as much as possible. We've had it for quite a while, I think since 2005. Out of the box as much as possible because once you start developing and making stuff your own and then some cool new features come down the line. It makes a lot of work to look at backing out stuff so you can implement the new features from ServiceNow and then maybe eventually putting your stuff back in. Just stay out of the box as much as possible, alleviate headaches.

The most valuable feature by far of ServiceNow is the rapid development. How quickly you can actually go out and change things, adapt things, ready to fulfill the business needs.

One of the things that we're trying to figure out is how ServiceNow can be more of a platform to be used as a backend. Because of the rapid development, it can barely oversee it for use at the back end. We're having discussions right now to actually understand what that will mean. The other piece is some of the UI's are currently being restricted from not having too much customizations. That puts us in a tough spot. Sometimes there are some corner cases where some people want something and we kind of change it. Those are mostly with new UI's. There's good reasons for actually locking those down. At the same time, it problematic for us.

I have been using personally ServiceNow for about five years.

Best in class. It has been really good; it's availability, reliability, performance. Sometimes people do dumb stuff with scripts. The performance is not the platform's problem, the problem is with peoples scripts.

It scales well.

It's great. I'm part of the ServiceNow community, so that helps for support. Their support works great - they are really helpful, they have the indicators and all the right stuff for closing tickets really quickly and they also put first resolving your issue. It's really great support.

We used to use different solutions. Some of it was kind home-grown. Nothing similar to ServiceNow from as a platform perspective.

It's already set up, you just have to work it out according to your needs. Just like in any other project, you need to understand your process, you need to understand how you need to improve your process. Don't automate the problem. Just like any other process, the recommendation is you either work with ServiceNow or you're work with a technology partner. I'm a technology partner and we help others with those types of things. It's really straightforward.

Integration - we started off at ITIL processes, but now we're looking at integrating it with other aspects of our business. We're on-boarding CMDBs so that we know what we have. On the other side of that, we can tie those into those processes that we already have so that we can actually see incidents across which devices or if there were changes made to those devices that correlated back to those incidents and stuff like that.

More out of the box stuff, but then again it's so customizable that you can make it do what you need it to do even if it didn't come with it.

I've used it for a little bit short of a year. My company has used it for four years.

It's been constantly stable. I wouldn't say never any down time, but I would say that we're usually at four nines.

I would say most certainly it's scaleable.

With my interactions with them, I would say that they're really good. I almost never have to escalate anything. It's usually the person that responds to me helps me out pretty quick.

Upgrades can be kind of painful. ServiceNow is a great product because you can do almost anything with it. On the flip side of that, it's kind of horrible because you can do almost anything with it. The more you customize stuff, the more effort there is in upgrading to see what isn't getting upgraded because you've customized it and then to work out what you have to do.

My advice would be to do it, not knowing obviously what their ITIL processes are beforehand. I would say, "Get ready to ride the roller coaster," because, like I said before, you can do almost anything with it, which is also a downfall because when we started we were doing just incident change and problem. Now we're doing incident change, problem, project, self-service portal, CMDB discovery, service mapping, even management. It grows exponentially. You have to try to keep up with all those pieces.

The ability to manipulate or customize all of the underlying structure.

That's a really hard question because their target audience is so diverse. They've got everything from medical to university and everything in-between. For me personally, I would say all these new features, these new things that they're doing are awesome, but I want documentation on what they're doing on the underside, what they're doing behind the scenes. I think I'm honestly in the minority with that. I think most people want to just get some admins and have them be able to do everything that a developer can do. I would say as far as marketing or sales, I would say they're probably going in the right direction. Enabling the admins to do more and more and more, while locking down, so they don't muck around and screw stuff up.

I've used it for four years.

It doesn't crash. They have a terrific up time, but I would expect that when you have four redundancies, that goes without saying. I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill.

The most recently released Geneva locked up a bunch of stuff. A good example is UI16. There's a bunch of stuff that's undocumented and it's locked away. It makes it very hard to get to. I would say that's a definite negative.

As far as I'm aware, it scales beautifully. You just throw another stack or two or 20 at it and off you go. We make a lot of custom apps, custom modules, which is why I muck around in the underside. As far as that goes, for scalability the sky is the limit.

They're a funny group. I've never had a ticket that I've submitted to support that was answered by the initial person that received it. It usually ends up going to their tier two or in some cases, the developer. I don't know how to answer that question because the questions I ask are very hard. I've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure that the support team is fantastic for someone that's new to the product or hasn't used it before but for me it's a bit of a rigmarole.

Actually, it's very complex. Usually, you're doing it with a partner. Most institutions have partnered with someone to help them with an implementation. How well it goes is usually on the implementation engineer or their team's shoulders. I have gone through an implementation that was just horrific and we made it work. I've seen implementations that go fantastic. You just turn a key and there it goes. I would say it really depends on the quality of your implementation engineer.

I would ask about the use case. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? Then I would advise based on their feedback provided and their budget. Some budgets are very small and I don't know if they would work with this solution.

In my role it would be Demand and Project because I'm a project manager.

I attended some of the sessions about Helsinki and I think some might be addressed there - reporting and Gantt charts. Calendar views - there are no nice calendar views and I think I'm just starting to learn about resource management but it would be nice for them to have the roadmaps so you can see an actual calendar view to see where from a project, (not necessarily resource but project) wear you are. Calendar views would be a huge addition.

Our company's been using it about two years, myself I've been using it about a year and a half.

No downtime that I know of.

It's a scalable product and we see it scaling for us.

I haven't been involved a lot with the support. I think that's going to change and I think I will get involved more but for right now I don't know that we've had issues. I haven't heard of any so I'm assuming we haven't.

I'll go out on the Wiki and look for answers and I might jump over to the community to try to find information.

For the first portion of it, I know we had a lot of internal change management so it took a little bit longer but they rolled it out all at once. I think it took about six months but I wasn't here for that. We rolled out Project and Demand and we did it in two months.

Go for it. I actually said that to someone who's nervous about doing it. Get everybody on it, don't do it piecemeal.

One of the gals that did a presentation [at Knowledge 16] said they're using demand and project but still using Microsoft Project. Don't do that, put it all in Servicenow. Even though it may be a little clunky in certain places, it helps to have one tool and everything in one place.

How configurable ServiceNow is, but at the same time you have to know what you're doing. It's not easy to make mistakes, but at the same time I guess it is. It's kind of difficult to explain.

Right now the way we have our structure is that we use record producers that go to a form, and we use the variable editor to show the record producer. One of the limitations is if you do UI policies and client scripts on the record producer, it doesn't transfer over to the variable editor, so it's kind of like you're doing double the work. If you use the requested item table, you don't have to do double that work, which seems like a limitation that you can't use that functionality on any other table besides the requested item table. That's a big one that bothers me.

I've used it for a little less than a year.

From what I heard we've had contractors who've come in who've worked on other people's incidences, and they say our incidence is the buggiest of all the other incidences they've dealt with. When we promote update sets some of the updates in the update set don't go to the next environment. It's completely random, and it shows up in the update set in the environment you push it to that it was promoted properly, but it doesn't show up. You have to go into that environment and make the changes. Little things like that, but it's always up and running, unless our company has an internet issue.

We're using it in one of our divisions, but cross functionally, so we see it scaling up.

Ninety percent of the time the people that respond to the high tickets that we open are really knowledgeable and solve our questions within a week. In the high ticket when you select a category, there's not enough categories, so sometimes we just have to select one. In that instance, we sometimes get somebody who doesn't really understand what are questions was, because we weren't able to select a great category for them to understood what was going on.

Go for it, but start in a small area, and don't bite off more than you can chew, because it does take time to develop this stuff. It's not as easy as everybody thinks, so I wouldn't make too many promises that you're going to get stuff out there quick.

The ease of use is great, whether it be for someone like me who's an administrator and developer, or just the end user in general. The fact that it's cloud-based, so you can access it from anywhere as long as you have a browser, or a smartphone. The overall ease of use is great.

The whole mobile aspect seems to be the key. People are still working, they’re not at their desks, so they need an easy way to work. I think that's going well in that direction. It seems like ServiceNow as a company has a pretty good vision on where they are, where they should be and it really matches up well with what we're looking to do.

We've been using it for just about a year now.

The availability has been great. Any issues we've come up with we've been able to easily rectify with working with support, so I would say it's definitely great.

Right now we pretty much just deployed it for IT use. We're getting ready to deploy it for some of our organizations outside of IT like our broadcast operations, our repeater, even facilities, so I think the future is looking good.

Probably the best that I've ever dealt with. Really knowledgeable. Usually pretty quick on getting back with you. Their website, wiki, and community are great. Probably the best support I've ever dealt with in my twenty plus years in the industry.

I've been in this industry so long. Prior to this I'd been working with Remedy for about fifteen years or so. This takes me back to the really old Remedy days when it was a really great product, before they were bought out by a big company, where there was a great community and great conferences.

It's pretty straightforward. We worked with a partner, Logic Callus to help us get setup. We had a hard date because we were coming off of an existing cloud system, so we had to really push hard to make it in that time frame, but we were up and running incident change, problem, and service catalog in two months. Basically what we had allotted for. It was pretty seamless.

I would tell you to take a look at it. It's a great product. Get a demo and get familiar with it, because you can pretty much do anything you need to do with it.

Originally when we first rolled out, it was obviously the fact that we had full IT service management in one area. We were extremely scattered and had many different tools all over the place and none of them were integrated. That was our initial sell feature for us.

As time has gone on and ServiceNow has evolved and matured, we are loving the ease of the product. Each year, each version, each release they come out with is all that much more configurable for us. One of the biggest things for us is the fact that we've had the opportunity to be a partner with them and have had the opportunity to have some input and feedback on their product to begin with and have seen some of that that have come to fruition. In fact, I just saw a demonstration and there were several things that I know were a part of suggesting and the input that they received from their customers.

I hadn't really thought much beyond the improvements that I'm seeing that they're putting out in Helsinki. My organization is currently on the Fuji release. We were going to be upgrading to the Geneva release in July. One of the things we were coming here [to Knowledge16] specifically to look at is jumping on the release and going straight from Fuji to Helsinki. Considering some of the things that I just saw that they rolled out, I'm going to be pushing pretty hard for that.

Many of the things that we felt needed a little bit more shoring up was their CMBD product and their discovery, they seem to have covered that in the Helsinki release. I'm not really thinking of what the next step is going to be at this point. I was wowed with Helsinki, so at this point I'm looking forward to rolling that in and working with it.

We implemented it back in 2011.

I like the scalability of it. We need an instance that we will have it within 24 hours. In fact, we have several instances in the Cloud. We have our production instance, we have a test instance, and we have four development instances.

I'm not necessarily involved in the day to day support that we would have to reach out to. Our architect is more involved with that. However, I do know that I have been the contributor of a few of the bugs that have been found. They seem to be very responsive, work with our developer and our architect team and work through the issues.

When we started out, we did it in phases. Our very first phase was the change management application in a very condensed version of the incident management application. Phase two rolled out in late 2014. At that point, we went to a full incident management application. We revamped our change management application, rolled out problem service catalog, discovery, our CMDB. We have quite a few, some 38, applications that are currently turned on. They were pretty basic and we've been over the years developing and expanding those.

The integration and automation are most valuable.

Their debugging tool. Sometimes it's hard to debug some of the scripts because once Javascript fails, it doesn't really tell you why. It just skips over it and It keeps going. That's probably the biggest room for improvement.

I've used it for about a year.

We've not experienced any downtime whatsoever.

We got ServiceNow to build apps for our company. That's what we're really using tit for our business relationship with customers outside IT.

They're responsive, had no problems with them. Any time we did have an issue, we submitted a ticket, and they'll get right back to you and call you. I haven't had any problems personally.

We were using email. It was pretty bad and we were dropping the ball often.

It's a great tool. I would say people need to get their processes correct before they get the tool because that really drives what ServiceNow is. You have to be somewhat oriented for the tool to work. Once you get oriented, it'll drive that process but if you had that process beforehand the tool is going to keep going.

I would say the ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow as well as record producers. We handle a lot of requests from our entire university. The biggest thing is giving our users a service catalog with a bunch of simple items, most of them are record producers, some of them need a workflow, just allowing them to go in and very simply submit request. For us that's probably the most valuable feature.

They've gotten to a pretty good place with where they are right now. I think a lot of it is going to be that citizen developer, making things a little bit easier to interface with. I really like the new rest messaging they put in there that allows for much easier integrations. I like most of the new application stuff and the IDE. I'd say from here, just smoothing out that whole IDE development process, making it easier to make changes to global in the IDE if that's where they really want us. Some improvements are probably needed there but I don't have anything massive on my list that ServiceNow needs to do.

I've personally used it for about four years.

I had no issues. When there is potential for a downtime, they always email me and let me know. Even when I get those emails, I've experienced mild hiccups but beyond that, I've never been locked out for more than maybe 30 seconds in 4 years.

When we started, we had about 35-40 IT folks inside of ServiceNow, plus probably about a thousand end-users logging in for self-service. Now we've probably about quadrupled that at this point and run into very little snags. I would say the biggest thing with scalability for us from a ServiceNow perspective is just make sure your user data matches whatever you're using elsewhere. We use single sign on and we need to make sure that the user data in ServiceNow matches that so that users can actually get in when they're supposed to get in.

It's mostly good. I would say there had been times where it's taking a long time for a resolution. Sometimes that's probably just due to the fact that whatever I'm submitting is not that important. I'll happily admit that.

I've had some issues that have taken four to five months to get fixed. Again, we're not talking the show stoppers. When I needed something, I've had probably two cases in the last few years where it's just been absolutely integral, like I'd get an answer right now. They were pretty good in those situations.

I would tell you that for me and for what our business uses, I highly recommend it, but that you should look at their business case and see if you need a product as fully-featured as ServiceNow is because it comes at a cost. Depending on what your needs are, it's possible to look at other products. There are a lot of similar products out there. ServiceNow is probably not the cheapest but if you have a specific set of needs particularly the ease of building applications, request forms, stuff I mentioned earlier, I think it's the best product on the market.

I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool. We've had a number of ideas, "Hey, I wish there was a way we could do this." and "Oh, well, let's make that happen." Then very quickly we were able to figure out a way to make it work and now there's a way we can make that happen. That's the best thing about it.

I think the biggest thing that I've seen is when we've moved to the knowledge-based version three, which happened relatively recently, there were a lot of new improvements that came with that, but there were a lot of things that actually seemed like a little bit of a step back. What we're hoping is that some of that's just like, "We wanted to present you with this new tool and we're going to add some of these things back in later on." There's a lot of the flexibility that we've come to expect from ServiceNow that seem to be gone in that new version.

I've personally used it for about three years.

We have the occasional problems with slowness, but I can't remember a single instance where it's been completely down.

For the foreseeable future, I think it's what we're going to stick with.

The support's been excellent. Our local rep has been excellent and I haven't personally reached out to technical support or anything, but I have been using the community and that's been great to have. The Wikis is an excellent resource so there's a lot of resources out there.

I wasn't there in our initial setup but our upgrades have been relatively painless.

I would absolutely recommend it. We're a little bit of a unique case in a lot of ways because we were on ServiceNow a couple years ago and we actually moved away from it, because we're running Salesforce for the rest of our university for case management. There was a mandate that we wanted everything to be in Salesforce, so we actually moved away from ServiceNow to Remedyforce. It was a disaster and about a year later we moved back to ServiceNow. I think it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that it's such a good product that even after we moved away from it we came back.

A lot of pain and tears went into that migration. We didn't really want to do another migration eight months later, but it was so worth it to do it. It's absolutely worth the investment of time and effort to do it.

It's ease of use, extensibility and just the ability to take it out of the box and use it with minimal custom configuration.

The documentation needs work. The wiki is woefully inadequate. I support federal customers, there's a separate US government approval process to use instances, and we're behind the rest of the public community. For instance, we don't even have permission to use Geneva yet, and Helsinki is already out. I know they're working on it and it's going to be faster, but right now it's a challenge. You see all these new features and we can't go out and use them until the government says we can.

I've been using it since 2009.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scaler for our needs.

They're inconsistent. Depending on who you get, they may or may not be able to immediately provide the kind of response you need and sometimes they take a while to do it.

I wouldn't say that I use the community a lot. I think our developers do, and I'm not a developer. They go out and use it more than I do.

It was easy to set up.

I would recommend it. I think the biggest challenge with all of the functionality that exists in ServiceNow today is to figure out where to start, and having a narrow strategy so that when you do buy it you don't try to do everything at once and get nothing done. A lot of the sessions around here [at Knowledge16] have done a good job in outlining that and driving their experience. I definitely recommend it.

It's very easy to customize and build off of. It's a simple platform to get up to speed on. Every company I've worked for has enjoyed their idle focus. The usability is a valuable feature, a lot of customers just enjoy the usability of it.

Since I've been working with the product for a long time, it feel like in the old days it was kind of a smaller, cult-like following. You had a more family-like community. Now it's gotten so big and it's kind of lost a little bit of that. I guess that's good for their business.

They seem to be trying to branch out and do a lot more than just ITSM which is usually what the core focus is, so sometimes there might be a little bit less emphasis on that. Personally I haven't seen that, but other people have mentioned it. It'll be interesting if they try to be all things to all people. They've gotten more polished, more professional, larger and a lot more sales-oriented when they went public. I don't really have many bad things to say about them.

I've personally used it since 2007. I worked at a company called Progress Energy. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were an early adopter and we luckily fell into it at the right time.

It was never bad, but in the early days there was definitely more outages, and we had an SLA. I think initially we even got some money back from them in the early early days in Progress. I'd say over the past five years or so that the reliability's been excellent.

I've had no issues with scaling, especially in the last five years. Availability seems to really have helped. We still have some performance issues, but sometimes those could be network related and not vendor related. Sometimes it's our development which is causing the trouble. I would not blame ServiceNow for any kind of performance issues that we've had.

Currently, we're not really scaled up at this particular point, so I don't foresee that being an issue, but we could encounter that later.

I'd say it's fairly good. The bigger they've got, the more I guess standardized their high systems become. Usually if we have something that really shows up on our radar, we can get a hold of somebody and get it addressed. In the earlier days when we had more of those, we also had pretty good luck at being able to get some senior engineers on problems that we had, even if they were self-inflicted problems.

We've used ServiceNow professional services and I've really enjoyed working with them and some of the other high-level partners, but to be honest with you, my current company isn't big on contractors. It's kind of an act of parliament to get them to bring somebody in from outside.

Being more technical myself, would say that having a clear and consistent view of your requirements, what you want to do, and to try to stay out of the box at first as much as possible. This is the third company I've worked for who uses ServiceNow and we always try to over-customize it at first, because everybody has very defined processes. Over-customization of the tool will hamstring you in how you can take advantage of stuff that they release. They always seem to release something that you're wanting to build right after you build it.

It's been a challenge because a lot of people think they know better, and everybody does it their own way. Staying out of the box initially is really helpful. Any tool can be made bad if you put garbage in. That's the biggest issue I've seen.

From my standpoint, it's the process flexibility. We're at a really low maturity level, especially for the age of our company - we're about fourteen years old. From a service and support standpoint we're still in that one maturity level, idol-wise. It's been a blessing with ServiceNow to be able to nail down our various business processes. The support ones we weren't working and they were all over the place. 

ServiceNow was need to get everyone working the same way through tickets and requests. The ability to have something consistently flexible enough for us to put some structure in and get folks all working the same way across multiple departments, but still have the flexibility for them to feel like they're getting what they want when they're getting what we want.

We're anxiously awaiting setting up Helsinki for the health service portal. I think we were originally Fuji, and we did some custom branding and it was a nightmare. Designers got involved and it made it horrible. We've gone back to stock because we had seen what's coming with Helsinki. That's what I'm looking forward to with the customization.

We've been using it about a year and half now. My role is mostly as a sys admin and some development of the forms, requests and business rules.

Rock solid. We have a dev instance where only a couple of us work in development of a few things and ideas. Then in our production instance we do not yet have a mid-server or anything implemented. We're about to, but we are integrated with Centrify for some of the sign-on. From our support desk folks, it's been solid for them. Everybody gets what they needs. It's one of the things in our organization that always works.

I don't see it really being an issue. We probably have 80 odd idol license users from about 10 or 12 actual support desk folks, but there's also some folks doing project management and ERP. We have 3,500 odd employees, but they're not all going to be licensed users. We've got a lot of support corporate users. Scalability hasn't been an issue and I don't see it being one.

Very straightforward. It's almost point-click-done. You have to think a little bit, but that's mostly planning.

I recommend it to anyone to do any service management. 

Immediate insight into reporting. For us it's about trying to wrap our heads around the volume of tickets that are coming in the door. How quickly we're getting our turn time done? Those were things that were missing from our incident management platform. We could basically do a data dump once a week, dump that into an Excel spreadsheet, then do some computation on the side, and get those numbers out.

With ServiceNow, we're able to generate those reports daily. We can get that feedback almost immediately. We just started turning on performance analytics as well. That's one of the reasons I'm here [at Knowledge16], is to take the courses to learn more about performance analytics. We're really looking forward to that, to get it in more real time, and provide dashboards.

It was all on Fuji. Some of the things I'm going to say might already be in Geneva and Helsinki. We use a zipper product for our project management portfolio, demand management and resource planning. From what I have heard, and what I've seen thus far, resource management needs to be a little tighter. We're running performance models around capacity planning. We need to know: How many resources are in play? How many hours are they actually working? What's the requirement for all those resources on those different pieces? How does that lay against what we're allocating?

I can't have resources available for 45 hours a week, and then deploy them against 60 hours, and they only turn in 37 hours. The resource planner we have today actually calls out those discrepancies. I'm hoping that with performance analytics this will too. I haven't seen a lot of that in play yet because I think it's still fairly new for them. I think if you're going to run your IT shop like a business, you really need that kind of insight.

The other thing we do is we report out against three different modalities in our IT shop. 1. You got to run the shop. 2. You've got to maintain the business to keep the doors open. 3. You got to grow the business. There's some fancy math that you have to do against what people are doing, and how they're deploying their time to roll that back into one of those three categories. With the current system we have, there's a way of doing data masking and manipulating it so that way you can form these common buckets. I don't know that this will do that, I hope it will.

With ServiceNow, you have to do a lot of manipulation ahead of time to get to what that end state is. That said, coming to the conference and playing with Geneva, and playing with Helsinki, I've got a slightly different opinion. I'm pushing my guys to move from Fuji directly to Helsinki. Just because it does allow me to set those records up the way I want to quickly, as opposed to playing with the report to get that structure right. The only way I can describe it is, if you really enjoy building formulas, and data drops, and pivot tables, and having all that, and then analyzing the data, Fuji is great. Excel is also great for that, but it's not what I want to do. I want to actually analyze the data.

I've been using it about six months.

It's one of the few systems we have in our house that hasn't gone down. It's very stable. As a matter of fact, we don't even put it on our availability list because it's up.

We're currently on the Fuji release. There's some other things that we want to do like Demand Management and PMO they're coming out with in Geneva and Helsinki. It's one of the reasons we're here at the conference is to see if it will be scalable to those processes as well. From what I've seen thus far, it's pretty scalable.

To be honest, we have mostly in-house support. Anytime I've had a call or a question, it's been answered usually within a few days. Most of what we're looking for is just how do we get the right data. Our guys are able to go back to the system analysts, and get that information out, and then tell me which field to put in the report. It's a fairly quick turnaround.

We were using a competitor product at the time. It was from our corporate office. We brought a real sharp guy in from NetApp. He had used the ServiceNow platform for about half a decade. He's been to just about every conference. He was bragging about the fact that he was at the Knowledge 2011. He's a pretty sharp guy. He brought it to our attention, and then helped implement it. We tease him and say that maybe he's brought a lot of his bad habits from the other companies into this one too. Along with some of our bad habits from CA, which is us poking fun at the customization. He really does know the product inside and out, and we're lucky to have him.

To be honest, I wasn't involved a whole lot with the initial setup. At that point, I was in the PMO. I was watching it get executed as a project. It was a fairly quick project. I think we implemented six or seven of the modules that are out there reporting incident management etc. We were up and running in about two to three months.

Now that said, there's always the PMO side of the house where I got to look at it and go, "Did we get all the requirements?" I think we did it more agile. We're still finding things that we'd like to do different. Things we'd like to change now that it's up and running. Getting it up and out of the box is really quick. We did some customization which was really quick too.

Go ahead and get it. You'll have a cleaner insight into your organization, and how it's really working. You're going to do a little fighting with your groups if they're not already doing careful time tracking. ServiceNow is based at the task level. They assume that they are going to give you a task. That task has some time collateral associated with it. That tells you how long you're spending on certain things.

You have better insight into those tasks, better insight into how that time is being deployed. If your organization isn't already doing that, you're going to have a little bit of a culture shift. If that's where you want to go, if you want to transfer your business from "Trust us, we'll just get it done," to "I can actually demonstrate how we're doing it." ServiceNow is the right product for you.

I would say Fuji is about a 7, and what I was playing with the other day in the labs is probably about an 8 or a 9. It's a great product. I like where they're road mapping it. They have a very clear plan, and where they're going next. That's pretty exciting. We'll keep the product in-house for a couple of years.

I like the out of the box module processes like the incident problem change. Currently, I think the most powerful features are discovery, orchestration, the business map of the relationships, and building applications for business. The business applications has been in place for a year, and we have new customers, so we want to make business applications not only for IT but for other departments in the company.

With it, I can do everything. I have some questions, requirements, from the customers. I never say to the customer, "I can't do it." That's because I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow. Even if something doesn't work now, I know that in the next few months it will.

From the customer perspective, I think the most important aspect is that they know what they're paying for. They pay once a year which makes it easy to plan financially. They know the costs of using ServiceNow, because you don't need extra resources, servers, backups etc. as everything is in the cloud.

From my perspective as a partner, I can do everything with ServiceNow so I don't stress about telling a customer during a meeting that I can do something even if I think I can't. Everything is possible and it's only limited by the imagination of myself and the developers.

I think that it goes too fast sometimes and they have too many releases too often. Sometimes there are bugs, maybe not making it unstable, but we need to change some customer customizations. For example, there are problems with the performance, so if ServiceNow is changing something such as data centers there can be issues. Availability is perfect of this platform. Genius, as I said at the beginning.

The only bugs are related to the configuration, not from the ServiceNow side, but from the partners that are doing something because they don't understand how it works.

It's small issues. Not a big impact for production instances and for the current work.

I worked with HP Service Manager. I know that BMC Remedy is quite similar in functionality to ServiceNow. They are trying to be in the same space but with HP Service Manager, I know there is a problem. For example, my previous company decided to go forward with ServiceNow as it had a service catalog. The Service Catalog functionality wasn't working in HP Service Manager, so they decided to switch to ServiceNow.

It depends. From my perspective, it's easy, I am a system architect, and I think from a customer perspective it's easy as well. I can see a new custom application created in a simpler way, for building applications, etc. but I'm usually only using the basic functionality, which I started to work with at the beginning because it's easier and I know that I can control it. From the user perspective, I can see that they are adding new forms to configure everything.

It's genius and there is no risk from the IT manager perspective. The management team of a company isn't at risk either and the future is always promising.

You can be sure that if you invest in ServiceNow the entire company will be happy. Always have a good partner to develop the instance and everything will be fine. For IT management, it's not risky to experiment with ServiceNow.

I would give it a ten. It's the best, from my perspective, especially compared with the IT systems I've worked with before.