Clarity SM Reviews

Customizability. You can easily make your own tables and add fields. Each customer is different and over time, things change. This product is flexible.

It is scalable and we are a big organization.

The upgrading process needs to be improved. They need more testing with more customers before the release. We are dealing with a lot of defects that should have been caught before the product was released.

I have been using this solution for 17 years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

This product is worth the cost.

I didn’t evaluate any other products. I worked for CA at the time when I first started using this product.

This product is ready to go as is. It can be customized, but you need a dedicated administrator to manage customizations.

We love the CMDB, it's a very good functionality. The whole ITO process is very well-defined. Problem management and SDF management are great features and really improve our day-to-day functions.

The software asset management is a feature for which we don't find the correct functionality. It's something we could potentially use, but it needs to be improved.

We've been using it for six years.

We don't have any problems. It's been very stable.

We are provisioning other clients in the platform, and it's scaled just fine for us.

We have a lot of experience with this type of software and manage on our own. We haven't needed to use technical support.

Last year, we looked at other solutions on the market and found some that were cheaper than CA. However, we decided to stay with CA because we already have a partnership with them.

Yes, but we decided to stick with CA because of our partnership and knowledge of the product.

CA is very good in both the implementation and operation phases. We've been very pleased.

It is mostly used for support. If customers have issues, they log tickets and the issues hopefully get fixed.

It works well for this. We do some things a little strange as you can customize everything, so it has to handle different things, and it also does this well. 

Probably it streamlines the organization. They have actually had it longer than I have been there. So I am guessing in the past, support tickets were probably handled through email and stuff like that, so I am sure things got missed and lost. Now, it is all there and stuff does not get lost.

It is easy to tell what needs fixing and the priority of things.

Probably the support end of it. You can track where the ticket status is all the way from the beginning to the end, and the whole company has access to it.

It seems to be fine. We have had it for a long time.

We had a few issues with the last upgrade. It was actually caused by another system that it talked to, it was not Service Desk's fault.

It works well. We have lots of stores that call in. We have gone from 200 stores to 600 stores and it supports all of it.

I have not really used technical support, but things get fixed by them on time and I have heard good feedback.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but was involved with one upgrade of it. The upgrade was pretty complex. They are really focusing on fixing the complexity of the upgrade, so it looks like it is going to be a lot easier.

We had a consultant helping us a little during the upgrade. 

I have no clue on pricing.

Get a demo. Try it out. See how it works.

I have been surprised by how many products CA has. We also use Agile Central, which used to be Rally. We just started to use it in the last year and a half, probably, so we are fairly new.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Bigger companies are usually better, just because there is other help online if you have issues. We have some vendors that we might be one of five customers if something breaks, and there is really no community to help. It always helps to have a good community around the vendor

I function inside of CMDB, Chain Configuration Management Data Base. I use it to work with our change management process, or configuration management process. To reduce down time, mean time to repair, audit functionality. Pretty much everything within CMDB, which is a subset of Service Desk.

It's a part of of a tool that other people use, and the big part of the problem with CMDB is getting a high rate of adoption. CMDB is not something that people see as a necessity, especially technical people. They don't want to deal with auditing, they don't want to deal with a lot of that stuff. So the fact that it's something they're already familiar with is a big deal. For a lot of companies, it's not built into their service desk, to my understanding. So that's a good thing about it. 

It's fairly easy to use, from a UI standpoint. Those are the main things that I would say are good about it.

It helps us have a clearer understanding of our environment, that's the big part of it that I use. As far as the ticketing part of that, it integrates within our email. If you're an end user, just a person, you don't need to go the website at all, you can do almost everything through email, so that is nice. 

I would like to see the API cleaned up. Right now, because of the way CA works, they combine a lot of applications. That's just the nature of it, they can't fix that probably. But the API is a mess, it's hard to navigate, hard to figure out. The documentation is okay, but from a back-end standpoint it's kind of difficult to work.

At our company, I think it's pretty stable. We have a good set of people working on it. I don't typically have any problems, with the front-facing part of it. There are not any really issues of stability from what I can see.

I would say we're a small to middle-sized company, and we haven't had any issues with anything like that. I wouldn't say it's a problem for us at all.

They've been good. My biggest problems have been working through the API for Service Desk, it's kind of a mess, that would be a nice way to put it.

They've been able to help me to get through, to where I need to go. Without that it's difficult, to say the least.

My company has been using CA for a long time.

I've been a part of PoCs at our company. When looking to invest in a vendor, the criteria include

• cost -  obviously a big concern
• functionality - if it's going to work within the tools that we have now. 

We're really big into automation, so integrating with other tools that we have is important. And CA - since we use so many of their products, between the mainframe, Service Desk - we really do use quite a bit of what they have. So they have a leg up as far as that goes.

I've worked with quite a few different products, from ServiceNow to Remedy, a lot of ticketing systems and the like. This is my first CMDB, as my main function. I would rate Service Desk lower than some of those other ones that I've used, because it seems like it's a little bit behind with innovative type of stuff. I like the UI, it's good. I would say, stand-alone, if I wasn't comparing it to anything else, it really does do what I need it to do, so I would give it a seven or an eight out of 10. Comparing it to other things, it would be about a six, because I think other software is better.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking at similar solutions, it would really depend on what they need. If they were looking for CMDB functionality, I think it really does do a good job of that. I think if you have other CA products, it does a good job of integrating with a lot of that. But I would encourage them to look at other products as well. I don't think it's an "industry leader." I think it's right up there with other tools, but depending on what you're doing and your environment, I think it's on-par with everything else.

The new xFlow interface that was introduced for Level 1 analysts really helps the them to achieve the best and fastest result for their users/customers.

First, based on certain ticket attributes, the heat of tickets is calculated and the list is sorted so the analyst can always continue to work on the ticket with the highest priority.

Then, ticket data is analyzed by the system to give analysts hints on experts or similar tickets/solutions.

Last but not least, the research tool is great to search the internet for solutions and get information back to the ticket.

The intelligence introduced into the product keeps getting better the longer you use it. Unified Self Service gives our end users an interface that attracts people and which they want to use, as it looks great and the offerings we provide makes their work life easier.

The methodology introduced for Level 1 analysts needs to be taken to Change Management Process. It would be useful to be able to look in Change Management and see the current status of the process. For example, it could show that this change has five steps and the analyst is performing step three. Also, end users would benefit from this step view.

Change Management is the most complex ITIL Process. Here a clear guidance for the person in action or all actors are important. Currently, there is room for improvement.The change process has a variable amount of steps to complete, depending on several attributes. If you look into a change, you should directly see that you are on step three out of seven, so you have a clear idea of how many steps have to be completed and how many are already completed. It gives you a good understanding of where you are in the process.

We have been using the solution now for eight years. It has given us a huge benefit in our daily work.

We have not had any problems with stability. We run the system for multiple customers and as a SaaS offering with very good stability.

The solution scales very well. A greatly improved version was introduced 3 years ago and since then, we have not had any issues with scalability or stability.

the SLAs provided are real life proven, we faced some priority 1 issues and got quick solutions and it works throughout their support centers.

We have experienced very good technical support. When you prepare for a go-live, you can engage with a dedicated technical support engineer in advance to get priority support in case issues occur during, or shortly after, an upgrade.

We used in-house solutions and it did not give us the coverage over all the ITIL processes to provide professional service/support.

Setup and integration went smooth. After installation, we were able to import ITIL content to get started modifying the processes to our needs.

we did a in house implementation only for difficult integrations/customizations we involved the vendor. They have professionals that know the software very well.

Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts.

We looked into other vendors too, such as Cherwell. But this is already 7 years ago. Since then, we observe the market and review our decision every two years to make sure that our decision is still right.

It provides great possibilities. To get the most value out of the solution, make sure to get your people in service management and administrators trained.

SDM provides out-of-the-box integration with other CA Service Management modules. For example, it integrated with CA CMDB, CA Business Intelligence (for reporting and dashboard), CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self Service.

• We are better able to manage and keep track of SLAs with end users.
• Analysts work more efficiently based on the ticket priority.
• We can better manage IT assets and contract license through CMDB.
• Reporting and dashboard: it is easy to produce a report with drag and drop functions.

Customization and configuration of CA Unified Self-Service needs improvement. CA needs to provide similar tools like Web Screen Painter (a customization tool for Service Desk) for CA Unified Self Service.

I have used this for 10 years; since CA Service Desk r11.

We have not had stability issues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’ll give technical support an 8.

We didn’t have anything before this.

Initial setup is straightforward.

They offer a concurrent analyst license that covers all the CA Service Desk modules: Incident, Request, Change, Service Level Management, CMDB, and Reporting.

There is NO license for the end user. In my opinion, it is a good licensing structure because some of other service desk products in the market sell separate licenses for each module.

We did’t look at alternatives.

• The product aligns to the ITIL process.
• All modules are integrated: Incident, Request, Problem, Change Order, and CMDB.
• The Service Catalog makes it easy for the end user to log a ticket.
• It is role based: easily manage the analyst based on their role; e.g., level 1 analyst, level 2 analyst.
• Unified administrator task.

With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes. From incident management to release management, CA SDM empowers and energizes ABS and their clients.

We are ITIL compliant and we have a lot of experience implementing IT services. We offer these facilities to our clients and customers. SDM has many automatic functions that allow us to offer value when implementing business rules in a short time and without code, just by configuring the tool.

We are an enterprise that sells IT services and all our areas involved in IT processes use the tool.

I think each tool suffers difficulties when a customer has requirements completely outside the standard, which is very common.

Technical support is good, once scaled to a second level. But usually, there are difficulties in the first approach.

CA develops and acquires enough tools and adds them to its solutions, but does not necessarily fully integrate them before releasing them. That also makes initial implementation difficult.

And finally, CA currently has problems delivering the tool in the cloud. CA tried to insert a new tool in the cloud but failed. Today, only MSPs can deliver the service, but not CA directly.

We have been using CA Service Desk Manager for 12 years.

In 12 years, we had only a pair of important isolated stability issues.

We have not really had any scalability issues. Rather, the companies are the ones that often do not have clear information about when they have to make the jump to a next level.

We have a lot of experience and do not have much need of manufacturer support. But, like most large companies, it is an area of opportunity.

We looked at open-source solutions and other branches like IBM or Remedy. SDM, at the time, offered critical differentiators that made us change and stay until now.

SDM comes preloaded and preconfigured. We have started a service desk in a week, but without a doubt, the difficulty comes from the customer environment; the volume, the processes to be assembled, their level of maturity, etc.

It is not the most expensive nor the cheapest solution. It depends on the negotiation with CA, but in general I think it is a fair price.

We evaluated BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.

I would recommend evaluating the tool with companies that have already implemented it. It is very important that you can find references that can be consulted.

You want to know about their time of experience in the market, whether they are certification tested with the manufacturer with an expert level, and are a reliable business partner for implementation.

The most valuable feature is its integrated nature. Compared to other service catalog and business process management suites, which are highly flexible, what you give up in those is the integration with other feature-set functionalities, platforms, and modules that would make up the rest of your IT organization. Hands down, the premier feature of the CA platform is the integrated nature of that platform. It's designed to work together.

Try managing the expectations of 180,000 users as if they were just one. That's how much it's improved our functioning.

I'd like to see CA continue to invest in the initial engagement of my end-users with Service Catalog. I would like to see CA continue to invest in form, design, and functionality.

From a developer's perspective, the biggest weakness is what you can and cannot do. I'd like to see CA continue to invest in reducing a need for technical staff to engage in process automation, vehicle limitation, and product design. I don't like to see developers in 2015 writing code for things that other companies have already figured out for a while.

Service Catalog and the Business Process Management suite over the last 20 years have gone through unbelievable instability. Over time, you have all these vendors that are consolidating up into the large players. Provision was bought by Metastorm, Metastorm was bought by OpenText, Lombardi was bought by IBM. That's instability. CA needs to invest.

From our end-users' perspective, it's fairly, very IT. This is obviously coming out of IT's solution. If you're looking comparably and relatively across Service Catalog that runs in the process management space, CA fell behind. They need to invest. They have been and they may need to continue to, so there's huge weaknesses in form functionality. Form design, form functionality. There's huge weaknesses with respect to your general approach to a committed processes to automation. I still require very technical developers where I shouldn't have to in 2015. This is nothing that they haven't heard, and they're already responding. They are investing. They need to. If they're going to play in the States, they're going to need to keep investing.

I don't get involved in that. That would be more the development team and support team.

I wasn't involved in the implementation.

Understand what you're buying.

If you're talking about just implementing Service Catalog and committing service delivery processes and automation, the organization can take the approach and adopt the strategy of, we're going to go and listen to our customers about what services they want and listen to our operations staff about how they want to operate and how they want to speak and how they want to do things. And that's a very highly flexible Business Process and Management suite. This is not that. This is, essentially, an ERP system for IT. There's going to be a certain element where the delivery team is almost informing, I know that's a horrible word, but informing, influencing the conversation of what we are doing to adopt a CA-driven data module. We are going to adopt the way in which CA intends IT to run its IT organizations, and we are going to implement a framework here. That's a very different approach. It needs to be an executive-supported and executive-understood.