Clarity SM Reviews

The important part for me is not related to any of the features the product offers as such as it doesn't offer anything some other product wouldn't offer. What I find comforting is that CA has been around for decades and therefore it is seen as a reliable partner, so companies buy their software even when there would be possibly better alternatives available. If I'd have to name one feature that makes it a viable option for some, I'd say it is the on-site installation instead of having your possibly sensitive data in the cloud.

I've worked as an employee and as an independent consultant for a number clients so I can't really speak to how this product has improved my organization. Usually, the organizations that decided to buy CA's service management solution had a very poor incident/request/change management system and process implemented, and this is what they got the product for. For some customers, it was way overkill when they would've been better off with some other commercial or open source solution. For some customers, it was scalable and robust enough to take the load the customer's use required.

The product has traditionally lacked the tools to support data migration from development to QA and then to production. CA has made a tool for this on the latest release but I haven't laid my hands on it yet. Also, data manipulation outside the UI - the parts that aren't modifiable through the UI by default and where the effort to enable it would be disproportional to the gained benefit - really lacks support from CA. They do ship tools that can achieve this but they're clunky, counterintuitive and prone to errors. Additionally, they bypass all the checks the system has in place for ensuring data integrity. Therefore, no, I'm not a big fan of those, and I've written my own tools to handle the data manipulation in a way that all the checks are made. Luckily, CA provides a couple of APIs for this. Also, the UI is a bit outdated and, while CA is working on bringing it to this century, they're still far away from it. The good part is it's pretty much just good old HTML and JavaScript, with just a hint of syntactic sugar from CA and you're golden.

The product has potential and if your business is flexible enough so that you can adjust the way of working to what the product offers out of the box, then it might be a good solution. However, I'm cutting down the score because of bad design decisions and outright bad implementation on some specific areas. Also, customizing the product to your needs beyond the basic UI changes means you'll have to hire either CA's professional services or an external consultant. Luckily, that's what pays my salary, so I'm not complaining too loudly. CA does offer training for this but they don't tell you the juicy bits. You'll have to reverse engineer and hack your way around to get to them.

I've worked with the product since 2008.

Deployment is more or less point-and-click.

Stability is usually ok, but sometimes you encounter issues that are sporadic and you have no way of reproducing those. Therefore, in the end, you just learn to live with them and find either a workaround or a quick-and-dirty fix that will hide the issue until it resurfaces. Since version r12.7, there has been fault tolerancy and high availability features built into the product, but it could've been done better. Officially the load balancer only supports F5 load balancers. However, with the price tag they have, I don't see too many medium or even large organizations going with that. They cook up their own solution, trading off some of the capabilities that make the system fault tolerant or HA in the first place.

Customer service is fine and their customer service manager actually follows through if you give them not-so-positive feedback on the case review you get after every case is closed.

Tech support is very courteous and it has some of the sharpest minds I've seen in CS that just enjoy the first line support and they really know the product inside out. Then there's a bunch of adequately competent people who can get you past the first line and you'll get your case handled even when it takes a bit more explaining.

Apart from the user perspective, I have no experience in the design and implementation of alternative products beyond the basic installation.

The initial setup is pretty much next-next-next-next-ok, if you just need to get it running to play with it. After you start thinking about security or fault tolerance and scalability, it becomes more complex. However, just to evaluate it a blunt tool from the shed will be enough to ram it in and get it running.

This is not relevant, as I'm working as an independent consultant doing the implementations. But if you want my advice, for the design, try to get someone who knows the product but is not in CA's pocket already. That way, you'll get honest opinions and options given to you. For the implementation, it doesn't matter, as long as the designer is supporting the implementation phase, has some stake in it and is technically able to do it in case the implementation team lacks the skills.

I'll say this: This is not cheap. However, with the rather hefty price tag, you do get the support from CA and for the alternative commercial products designed for same scale use, the price is still competitive.

Contact CA and get a 30-day trial license. You'll get to see the product and play around it. It will not be enough to implement any custom features you want apart from the very basic ones, but at least you can get a feel of it. Additionally, you could hire a consultant to evaluate the suitability for your business, assuming you have the service management processes mapped out already. If you have no established processes and you can implement whatever process the tool can support, then you're good to go and it's only a matter of comparing the prices.

The most valuable features that we're finding right now are the customer service portal and the ability to have a one stop shop experience, and that's what we're using the tool for. Been a lot of upgrades in the last year or so that have let us be much more customer friendly and create a portal that's easier for our citizens and state employees to use.

The benefits are if you go back a year, we'd have 20,000 tickets a month and we were to having to track each ticket individually and using the new integrated portal, we're able to combine those into workflows, and actually track a user's experience from the start to the finish. We were finding that we had to try to look for individual tickets and maybe people were closing tickets when they finish their part, but it didn't give us the whole picture. We've really been able to get out the metrics of a full service experience. That's been our prime focus over the last year.

I like to call what we are establishing is our operating model. I call it our ecosystem and so we really worked with the CA architects to design what that should look like, how it would integrate with other existing software and tools. We built a picture so everyone can understand this is what we're building, just like a real architect plan would be, and it let us have a road map for a few years and go to our state and get money to actually implement something.

I think the stability of the solution is pretty good. We've not had any major issues. I think that it's been stable and consistent and pretty quick response times.

Scalability I think has done a reasonable job for us. We're at the beginning of setting up, we've about 15 workflows and we want to get to 30 or 40. It's not been that challenging for us to make that happen. What we've learned is that the tool can do what we want but you have to make the business process changes and to establish the workflows. Get in the process to finding people to work in the new way has been the real challenge.

We do have access the architecture team specifically and do need to talk to the technical support staff. They've been able to help us through anything that we have challenges with from little problems to bigger issues. What we've really seen is the architect help at the beginning has really helped make our solutions better even before we implement them.

I think that we did use some other vendors to help us implement some of the solution, and some of those groups were not as strong as we might have wanted, but I think everything from CA's perspective has been pretty strong. The one element that we've wanted to see improved and we've really worked with them on is the user interface is what I like to call a little conky and so we are consistently working with them and the product marketing people to make it better.

Mostly it was a financial forecast, looking at how much it was costing us to do that. Also we're working in Colorado to setup our own cloud serves and maybe that we offer to the counties and to other state or other cities inside Colorado. It was just time to put that into our data center and a little bit more in our control, but really it was a cost scenario where it saved us money to convert those licences and better idea for 2 or 3 years and then we can look at where we could be in the future. Maybe the cloud providers were not as advanced we might have wanted at the time.

I think we were a year, year and a half into our big implementation of that whole ecosystem. I think initially we probably had some bumps and it was a little bit slow based on we were in the cloud, and migrated back into our data center so that we could see growth and speed and improvements there.

We really looked for the capabilities of integrating with other systems. There were a lot of interfaces already defined, easy ways to leverage, we had VMware, internal setting infrastructure team already, time keeping systems. We probably had 2 or 3 of their products already, so it was easier to add the others rather than completely change it all together, even though we're completely open to the future looking at what is possible. Right now it makes sense for us to work within the existing suite. In the state government funding models, we have to plan 18 months in advance. You're never really current if that makes sense, so we look for mature tools rather than bleeding end solutions, because we can't take the risk.

I think we were certainly looking at ServiceNow as a possibility, and they would be a good provider and can meet a lot of our potential solutions. We couldn't replace things that we already had with CA, so it was an easier transition to use what we had.

I think it's a 7 or 8/10 given that it certainly does what we needed to do, but I don't know if it's anything spectacular. It seems like it integrates things rather than really operates in more new and modern ways that I think the current population wants. Maybe that's a perfect fit for the state employees or a mixture of that, but I think that we would want to see continual improvement and really think differently in a way that mobility needs to operate.

I think I would really look at the business process first and then what are you willing to do and what are you willing to change. There are a lot of solutions that are possible. I think the CA suite really does work well, but you have to work at it. You have to be willing to bend to any solution's workflows, and so I think you just have to look for the one that's the best fit for your willingness to change.

• Incident management
• Problem management
• Exchange management
• Conflict resolution management, defining two configurations items across the board

I think maybe the biggest improvement has been in the integration parts of our organization. Though it's an easy solution to use, I find colleagues talking about CMDB parts. Sometimes I feel that maybe there must be a way to improve it where it's kind of simplified in a way where it's more usable. I think sometimes it's too much for someone to use, or someone gets lost, or someone complains about having too many things in there. It's not easy to manage, not user friendly, and maybe not easy to use.

So, when you get down to it, you have to see the details in the ways in which it's used. Maybe they have to work out the interface in a way that is more usable based on whatever you're trying to see.

I know that there is a mobile application version coming with version 14, though I haven't seen it yet. Hopefully it's going to really improve the mobility. It's one of the things that I would love to have. It would help those inside be able to change the way that they are doing business. I haven't seen it, but I would love to see it.

We use the ITN model, and we're about to upgrade to version 14.

Perfect. One of the most stable solutions ever.

No, we have our own developments.

I'm managing the project, but I'm not integrating the technical part of it. I used to work in the front technical team for the center and the old versions, but nowadays I'm just managing the project as manager.

Implementation wasn't complex. You just have to know what you're doing, maybe you have your process set to where you know where things are, if it's clear enough where technically there's no issues. It's just the way that you want to configure it.

For a service desk, maybe look at other options due to the cost. It will happen someday probably because of the cost. Now ServiceNow is coming along and wiping out everything.

Perhaps the cloud will bring down the cost. If somebody has an alternative with a cloud-based solution, that would bring down the cost.

We use this solution to improve user experience. With the new xFlow and Service Point features, we are able to bring users even further to our side. This is a huge gain when we look at a heterogeneous environment in terms of culture and variety of systems in operation. Demonstrating ease of use and interaction for end users along the same line of usability for support analysts was a key factor in the success of the deployment.

Visible integration between ITIL Processes makes service management easier by providing a broad view of the health of the organization's technology infrastructure, cost savings, and future investments.

Another relevant point is the ease of customizations and integrations that are inevitable in midsize and large companies.

XFlow (Temperature) and Service Point together provided an extremely user-friendly and collaborative experience to the point of making it easy for all users of the product, whether end-users or analysts.

In these resources, knowledge management gains strength and favors the dynamics of use and service, ensuring agility in operations.

The part of notification methods and satisfaction surveys remain almost unchanged. Perhaps greater attention to these two simple and native features could give the set a greater force. It is as if such modules have not evolved with the rest.

Diversifying notification methods with pop-ups or ready-made WhatsApp or Skype integration packages would be welcome.

Making the Satisfaction Survey more interactive would also be interesting.

This has the best possible stability.

The scalability is the best possible.

This solution has satisfactory service and support, even after the Broadcom acquisition.

We did use another solution previously but there was a need for evolution.

This initial setup of this solution was complex, considering external access for Mobile use.

The implementation was performed by the vendor and our internal staff, both with equivalent knowledge and expertise.

Our ROI is satisfactory.

My advice is to try to test the product a lot, including its procedural dependencies.

Advice from some end-users would be very interesting, as it would evaluate the ease of integrations and customizations.

We did not evaluate other options as we were already satisfied with the product and would incur a high cost.

Try to focus on Knowledge Management and CMDB. Use CA Productivity Accelerator to learn and automate CMDB integration as much as possible.

The main purpose is for service desk use. It is a repository of information.

It helps when you have an incident or performing a problem change management process. You can view what all the relationships are between the CI that you are changing or using. It helps the engineers to better understand what they are facing.

It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information.

• We would like more information about all the configurations that we have on our infrastructure side.
• The interface for the users is a bit old-fashioned and not user-friendly.
• We would like the CMDB to be populated automatically. At the moment, everything is manually created.

It's very stable. I don't have any problems regarding to it. 

There are no issues with the scalability. It is fully supported.

All support for CA products is quite good. It is not the best support, but all our problems have been solved.

I was not involved. It was already implemented when I joined the company. It was migrated from another company, and I understand the migration process was not difficult nor complex. 

It is quite a good product, and it's stable. They have a lot of features that you can customize to your organization. 

Everything should be automated, because if you are trusting on users to create their information, it will be not the truth on the moment. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability of the vendor
• Support
• How the vendor is positioned in the market.

We use it as our ticketing system, as well as our ability to use CMDB and change management, and for our incident request management.

It has performed very well in these functions. We have been using it for eight years now.

It has helped us to organize a lot of our assets, so we have configuration items to attach to our change management. We can have tickets for change management and set them aside for an approval process. That is something we have never had before, and it is something we have been able to divide up amongst our different campuses for ticketing use. That is something we have not been able to do either.

I would say change management and request management, as well as CMDB. 

We would like to see them revamp, or rework, a lot of their configuration management database structures. We hear that is on the horizon. We are very excited about that. That is something we use a lot. 

We would like to see them integrate more of a service catalog, which is more of an Amazon-type fill in your bucket, then sign in, once you decide what you want. This is something that we would like to see from the product, as opposed to what we have seen in the past, which is login, then go pick. It would be nice to say, "I like this, I like this." Fill up your cart, then go buy it.

There is room for improvement. I think the product is going in a different direction than what is has before, which I think is good. I like that they are looking at things, and they are opening themselves up to the community and allowing for people to bring enhancements to them and ideas. To be able to share those ideas with their management.

Our initial installation of the application was on a different platform. However, since we moved it to Windows, with a Windows database, things have been very stable as far as it is concerned. 

We were using Linux beforehand, and it just was not stable enough. It had way too many problems, and we found out the customer base for Linux was small, so was the support. Therefore, moving into Windows was the better idea for us. It is much more stable now than it ever has been. We did the move in 2010.

We have been able to utilize the system across all our different campuses. We find it to be fairly scalable, as far as bringing it up. We have not done HA yet, or any kind of high availability. That is something we are looking at as a possible future change. Right now, with our user base, we are pretty simple, but we find that it is scalable. It is something we are looking at in the future. Just not right now.

We have three different campuses, serving probably about 700 analysts, 40 different help desks, and about 70,000 possible customers.

They are much better than eight years ago.

We have received much better support. People that really know what they are talking about. They are able to help us better than they were in the past. We have had less breakdowns in how long it takes to respond to us. Their response time has been improved over the last five years, or so. The response to us, as far as making enhancements or changes, has been good. We have had good luck with technical support. I have no problems with it at this point.

I think they are doing rather well, as far as their support. Where I work in the university, we have about 50 different applications that we support within our department, with a wide range of varying support structures and support. They are probably one of the top vendors which we work with that do well in response to us and helping us out. 

Usually, we look for a new solution because most of the group does not like a product, and they go after a different product. It is not usually something we look at as a corporate standpoint, because we are a state entity. There are always those that can get involved and say, "Hey, we want to make a change." It is not always just us that say, "Hey, let's go and do it." 

Right now, the CA Service Desk Manager is a set standard for the university. All three campuses are using it, but there are some other help desks out there that are smaller help desks. Local help desks that are using other tools. Smaller tools. So, it is not like they have to use it from a corporate standpoint, but it is available to them if they want it.

I think we had the Amdocs product, which we had used before. Then, we had what is called Request Tracker, which is an open source tool for consulting. I can't remember some of the other ones. For this one, a lot of it came down to price, and what they could get for us. Then, it came down to the capabilities of making large changes that we could not make. 

At the time, which would of been 2008, it was all web-based. A lot of the stuff that was being brought in was either Microsoft only, or it was client-based technology. This was a web-based technology, so that is kind of why we stuck with it at the time, but things have changed in 10 years. That was the original thought.

Engage with consultants from the vendor at the very beginning. Learn the product, then train yourself to work on it. It is something you can work on yourself with a lot less consultation from the vendor. Also, take small steps before you start beginning with different parts of the tool. Do not try to bite off too much, as a lot of companies will try to do. Start with one, then work your way towards the others. 

We are currently not using xFlow yet, but it is something we are going to take a hard look at as to whether or not it will be useful for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I think a lot of it has to do with where their niche is in the market. 

A lot of the decisions that are made are based upon bringing everybody in to have some sort of a RFP process, where they sit down, and do some sort of bidding. It is usually a bidding war, because were a state entity. I would like to say that we could pick a product based upon whether they are the best, but it doesn't always work that way.

I would personally like to see it where a product is more flexible. A product has the ability to make changes in the different environments, especially from a support standpoint. When you would go and look at different ways that help desks, or support, is structured across corporations, or across higher educations, in this case. There could be a lot of segmentation going on in lots of different places. It is nice if you are able to flexibly change the product to bring it to different customers, so you can support their needs. Flexibility is an important key for different vendors, but for us, it is nice. 

We would also like to see them challenge themselves and not stick with the norms of specific platforms, such as Microsoft or Mac, even though typically businesses will only code to a specific platform like Windows. It is nice to see others do things where it works with different browsers, or it works with different platforms. That helps us out, because in our world it does not work all homogenized with a single platform. It is lots of different platforms.

Change management. We use it to control changes throughout the company. Developers submit change orders and it flows through to QA, and then on to our production deploy. We use CMDB to be sure we understand the impact to changes. So, the focus is for auditing and reducing changes that break things. That's how we use it.

It's performed well. It's a reliable product. 

It keeps all of our changes in one spot, so it's easy for management to see any given changes that are happening, and how they cross pollinate with CMDB.

• The auditing
• The view it provides into who's doing the work
• How long it's taking to do the work, where the black holes are in terms of the work

I've heard about the xFlow. I'm looking for the improved user interface. A lot of people complain about the amount of time it takes to do things in Service Desk. It's a very old product, 20 years, so there is a lot of legacy there, hard to shift. 

We would love to be able to do more on our mobile app for our technicians that wander the floors. We don't use the mobile app because its very difficult to use. I understand there are upgrades in the works there. 

If I had to choose, it would be more around the user interface than the mobile experience.

Stability is good. We've had a couple of outages but it's not a chronic problem.

In terms of scalability, I don't know if you can get integration. There have been complaints about integration with other tools. A lot of people wish that Service Desk had more of a REST API interface instead of SOAP. Some of our networking guys - we're trying to drive automation - and the enterprise, would like to see an easier way to interface with Service Desk.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is

• a company that's financially stable
• I like leaders in their industry; I think CA is one of those
• a company that is agile and responsive to our needs.

I give it a seven out of 10, only. The three that I'm not giving it is just because it is such a legacy product.

I would tell colleagues to evaluate everything. One of the reasons we are going to be reluctant to remove from Service Desk is because it is so entrenched, it would be such a big deal. However, if I had a clean slate, I would advise someone to evaluate all the competitors. Service Desk is not perceived as one of the better products in this space. It serves us well but I would tell them to evaluate ServiceNow and some of the other products.

Provides effective management of service calls and work assignments. It includes good APIs to extend functionality.

In addition to IT, we also use this product on our business side to manage lobby flow for clients and workflow for our client service staff. The product has allowed us to efficiently manage workflow, measure performance, and analyze customer service measures.

The UI is old and passé. It needs to be intuitive, efficient, and allow users to tailor it to their way of working.

I have used CA Service Desk for fifteen years.

The product is very stable.

The product does scale effectively up to a point. Beyond that, it gets a little complicated to extend it.

I would give technical support a rating of 6/10.

We used Remedy and switched to CA Service Desk for cost and ease of implementation.

The basic setup is easy and straightforward. The product is tailored around ITIL. Business processes need to account for that in order to make the most use of the product.

We think CA pricing is straightforward. They do have a tendency to re-bundle (and sometime rebrand) products and you have to be on top of that. If you build a relationship, working through these things is much easier.

This was an easy choice fifteen years ago.

Look into the SaaS offering from CA and compare. While CA Service Desk has rich functionality and is stable, its skin is old and cumbersome.