Clarity SM Reviews

It brings a maturity of collaboration and support, facilitating the work of analysts, and benefits end users in service.

It provided greater agility in service and a more agile management vision.

We would like to see improvements mainly without the Service Desk. This was where we saw the greatest gain in unpaid performance and collaboration.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no issues with deployment, because the wizard of this version has been greatly improved.

So far, there were no identified stability problems.

So far, there were no identified scalability problems.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent, because it leaves a reality of collaboration more evident.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent, because it provides and demonstrates collaboration, which speeds up the service.

We did not use a different solution previously. We just upgraded.

The initial setup was direct and easy with the settings that occurred in the wizard. We used to make it version 14.1.

We implement the solution with the support of the manufacturer. They had a maximum skill level.

As a financial institution, we cannot provide such information.

ROI is closely linked to its current maturity. Aim to know exactly where you are, where you are going, and map the necessary actions and adjustments before deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We were already satisfied with the benefits of the previous version of this product.

The training of analysts and a campaign to demonstrate end user benefits and functionality is very important.

We have integrated Service Desk Manager fully from servicing the customer, right down to the network configuration. It's fully integrated. That provides many customer benefits, and enhances our customer experience as well.

Service Desk Manager keeps our customers updated regularly regarding any network outage and aware when we will respond to his request and when it will be repaired. Our customers receive better service and we also have a better experience serving them. The CA tool is actually helping us and we can see drastic improvement from it.

The view we now have of our customer base, and how they link to the network is more of a bottom-up approach. I would like to see it from a top-down approach. We want more visibility into how the network layers are linked. That's the next stage that we are working toward.

I also want to see how we can bring DevOps automation and lifecycle development into the equation, and evaluate how that helps us to mature much faster.

We have been at this more than a year. It's quite performance stable. We're doing more enhancements to our setup. The initial implementation covered 70% of our network. So now, at full capacity, we're adding additional features and have implemented more enhancements. There is deeper integration with our business systems and operating systems that give a fully integrated view regarding how CA Service Desk fits into the bigger service offering.

Currently, we are busy migrating customers to use to Service Desk. We are going to scale up to about 4 to 5 million subscribers. This will allow us to further extend our look at network integration as well. It's going to extend far.

We've got onsite technical support from CA. My impression is that they have improved drastically since we started.

We had a request to scan the market. CA was the best product at that time. They needed to make sure that our service catalog was communicated regularly within our business, so that everybody is briefed on what is new and how CA has evolved.

We needed a product that would integrate with our architecture. This is important, because we were looking for a specific piece, and it fit the puzzle nicely. There were certain features we were also looking for; a set of business requirements that we had to fulfill. That was basically our criteria.

I was involved in the initial setup. The first one was quite complex because we had to integrate into legacy systems. We had to integrate into new solutions with other suppliers and integrate into the integration bus, so it was quite complex.

There were other suppliers that we also looked at and compared. We looked at the Asian companies.

What helped us is that at the beginning is that we had a lot of offshore support. The best is to get CA onshore support. Then they understand the culture of the company. It's not only from a documentation point-of-view. They understand how to interact with different people. I recommend this even if you are based abroad. A local presence for us meant a lot.

The ability to add external databases.

In combination with Automation for Cloud Services, it has increased the ability to dynamically allocate Virtual Machines for test and development.

Pretty much all of its areas: It has a very outdated UX - circa Windows XP It has a lot of errors in its documentation. It has a lot of undocumented quirks and limitations. It has a lot of bugs. Its UX does not support HTML 5 style controls resulting in the need to build very bizarre workarounds. Its API architecture is not orthogonal.

6 months

Yes. As listed above.

Yes, in using the Service Catalog Editor it would periodically require that IE be restarted because of the memory leaks.

Yes. Because features like Copy Linked Service did not work properly, services replicated at various levels of the hierarchy had to be simply copied, resulting in a maintenance nightmare when scaled to a significant number of services.

Customer Service: Horrific. Unless an explicit and costly "service issue" was raised through the enterprise support agreement, CA had zero interest in accepting problem reports. And when a request was made for improved or corrected documentation through the Enterprise support agreement, the response was "we do not receive enough such requests so no such support is available, - CA Services will contact you shortly to discuss providing this custom function".. No such followup contact was provided.Technical Support: Horrific. See above.

No prior solution existed. The main reason for the choice of this solution was because Microsoft System Center did not adequately present its support for Linux and thus management perceived there to be no support.

Complex. Too many moving parts that are poorly and sometimes incorrectly documented.

Multiple vendors

Yes. Microsoft Systems Center, IBM Tivoli.

For the analyst, the user experience is better. Also, for the demo, it is a good experience for them, because they want to look at a fancy application and forms, and know that it is to easy to use them and create easy tickets.

The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information.

We are also installing xFlow in our QA environment at the moment.

More user experience in the look and feel of the application. 

Still implementing.

The stability is great.

We are working on installing in the production environment.

In some cases, I receive late information. In general, it is good.

It was not simple or complex to set up. It was medium with CA's support.

Its implementation was a little complex. I needed support with the service department of CA to work together to implement the version of the product.

In my work, we only use CA products.

I would recommend this version of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the customer service and the quality of the product.

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.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate many processes – like change management, incident management, problem management, CMDB, all of them – in the same tool.

The benefits that we are seeing from the service management is since you can integrate the products, you can make correlations of which changes cause incidents, or which configuration updates have changes or have many incidents over a certain period, and from that, gather more data to work with it.

From the implementation side, it's a tool that you can customize a lot. This customization sometimes, on upgrades and so on, it gives you a really hard time, so I would suggest trying to build a solution that you can operate with the customizations that the product allows you to do.

I would like to see a new UI, and stuff that will keep customizations going on so you don't have to do all of the reworking all over again to keep up with the next product version.

The stability just depends. In small shops, it's very stable, but once you go into big shops, such as banking infrastructure, that have many policies, sometimes there are some challenges there.

It gives the opportunity for growth. If you have more services and more users, you just keep growing and scaling the hardware and the software, and you still get the same response.

The initial setup just depends whether you have training or not. Usually, you just need the first training. After that, you can just follow up with the guidelines that CA has given to you and you can pretty much go through them.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like CA is just the recognition; the support provided for it. I want to have support from a company and CA just delivers that.

My rating is basically based mostly on the integration; to try out a new solution, and we chose service management; the process integration. How many solutions can give you that process integration together in just one tool? Most of the tools are just for tickets, incidents, or problems, but they don't give you the whole package together.

Incident/Request/Problem/Change Management, CMDB, and Business Intelligence.

From the user’s perspective: One of the most criticised aspects by the clients is the web interface, which is not too user friendly and hasn’t been changed in the last years. CA is trying now to promote an additional new interface which is more user friendly, but in this new interface, they removed some key functionalities. So, it brings value on the design, but with the price of losing some features.

I’ve been using it for the last eight years.

They usually have three levels of support: 1st, 2nd and 3rd, which are the developers. The 1st level of support is not always too experienced, but you can get real help from the 2nd and 3rd level.

I am part of a reseller team. The initial deployment of the application with the default configuration is not very useful for the client. The post-installation and configuration of the solution requires more advanced knowledge of the tool, as it allows a high level of customisation through scripting. If you have an experienced implementation team, you can get very good results and value from the solution.

For the first step, before deciding on a product, first make a detailed analysis of your internal processes and establish a list of key functionalities and requirements.

Present your requirements to the reseller/vendor and get details about how they can be implemented in the solution. A big advantage of this solution is that with a proper definition of the processes, almost anything can be configured & scripted.

I would say the integration to our monitoring products and to other products that we use, that's really key for us. Ease of use, it’s very easy to train. We don't have any issues with people getting in or having access problems. That's been the greatest part - it's easy to administer. Our stability has been really great. We are currently in the process of upgrading to a newer version. We have not run into any issues. We've had a great work with CA.

I would like to see probably not so many individual modules where it kind of wraps it all together. I would like to see like asset management be part of Service Desk so that I don't have to keep buying more modules, I can have everything in one.

Integration is probably one of the biggest for us. We want it to be able to integrate with everything we use so we don't have to rip and replace everything.

I would say it’s pretty good. Like I said all the integration and stuff like that really gives us the ability to scale it to whatever we need. The CA technical support has been amazing. We have had really good luck with every issue that we run into, has been resolved within probably three days. Communication has been amazing. It’s definitely top notch.

We were on a very old version of Remedy, lots of issues. Moving to CA was a pretty easy choice, cost and everything came into play. CA was definitely the right choice for us.

It’s the integration between all the different tools we currently use. Really ServiceNow was the only other. There was a lot of things that CA could do over ServiceNow that we liked. 

I would probably rate it a nine and mainly just because the fact that I would like to see more modules included in service desk. Again I keep going back to integration.

Really look at everything you use and how you can integrate those together, really evaluating that and how easy it is because everybody will tell you they can integrate and for the right amount of money, everybody can. You really want the ease of integration. We were already using Spectrum. It was an easy option there because of the fact the integration was so easy. The integration with X matters that we were already using made sense. It’s very simple and easy to do those integrations compared to having to build new APIs and stuff in order to have those integration.