Micro Focus Service Anywhere [EOL] Reviews

• Service desktop management
• Analyzing Big Data
• Real time Dashboard
• A cloud service
• Easy to get feedback from users

I'm involved in the implementation, so from my point of view, I can manage computers and peripherals in an organization. Previously this would be done using an Excel file to keep records of tickets and change requests and it was difficult to trace issues and perform analyses. Now, our customer has a flow chart to maintain requests, and the service desk has got good feedback from the customer.

It should be more flexible and have more features added to make it easier to use. We can delete some data ourselves because the data is on the cloud, but we have to raise the issue with the support team to do it.

I've used it for nine months.

When I imported data to the system, it did not detect duplicate information. You can't delete the information yourself and need help from support to do it. The issue with this is if the support team is slow it can compromise the SLA.

3/10 as it has a lot of scope for improvement.

The initial setup is straightforward because it's a cloud service. You just have to prepare a tenant and some demo data.

I'm part of a team implementing it at a customer site.

Get the requirements from your customer as much as you can. Declare a timeline of the project and plan to implement. For master data you should be cleaning it up and making it clear before you import it into the system.

• Configuration Management
• Dashboarding
• Analytics is definitely a game changer and has the potential to provide the organizations with usable data to be to enable them to be proactive in addressing customers’ requirements

One of the best features is the ease of use Out of the Box with very little need for tailoring to get started. We can provide a rollout in two to four weeks from customer engagement to production use. HPE aligns this closely with frameworks, similar to ITIL, as well as best practices.

It needs better integration with other solution and product sets from HPE.

I've used it for close to three years, since HP Service Anywhere v2, and we're currently using the latest version.

We had some teething problems with Dev tenant export to production tenant import.

7/10 - you get good days and bad days regarding the time to resolution, and the time to get a reply from support. However, mostly it's very good.

We still use HPE Service Manager alongside it, as we are implementers of the products to customers. Each one has its pros and cons, and depending on customer requirements we can guide them as to which is the best solution to implement.

It was very easy to deploy and configure. It was not entirely codeless, however this was very minimal and easy to understand.

We are a vendor and have done multiple deployments for different customers across different organization types.

The pricing and licensing is reasonable, and if adoption is good, ROI more than offsets the cost of licensing. Additionally, all the infrastructure, maintenance, and support costs sits with HPE.

If you are looking for a quick ITSM deployment to address your needs without unnecessarily complicating the processes and deployment, you should look at HPE Service Anywhere.

For me, it saves time. It is accurate, secure and reduces overhead cost. Since for me, time is important and this product saves me time, it is good in my books.

We weren't doing it beforehand, so it has brought a lot of new things to the table and works quite well. For us it goes back to time and cost benefits; putting in less effort is a good thing. Things are easier to manage.

Anything that can basically reduce the amount of time that the guys spend working on a specific problem or task.

There is always room for improvement that can be in terms of functionality, cost of market, ease of use, training of the product and so on.

If it brings functionality into the solution, that would be good. I'll leave it at that because there's so much that they can offer, it's unreal.

It's rock solid and good. There are no problems. Something breaks when we break it. Apart from that, it really works, so I can't complain.

In regards to scalabilty, we haven't put that to the test. It does what it does for us. I assume when we will grow, it will grow with us.

I haven't personally used technical support but the guys in my team probably have.

I wasn't using any other solution. Someone brought it to me and had a good business case. I sat down, reviewed it and then agreed to do it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

You should definitely put it in the mix and do the benchmarking against other products. Find out what you want from the app. Don’t go for it, if it doesn't tick your boxes but if it does, then use it.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are openness, integrity and reliability.

The most valuable features are the support management for all requests and change incidents that we can refer to our customers, and the tracking of all action done on support activity.

It helps to capitalize everything in our company and also to leverage the activity between the teams.

We think asset management can be improved. We have 1 dedicated person in the company for this part; it's not me. He needs additional features in order to manage assets more efficiently and receive it automatically when our server starts.

We deployed Service Anywhere in April 2014.

The solution is now quite stable. At the beginning of the deployment process, we had some difficulties, especially in regards to performance. Now, the performance is better and the quality of release has also improved in regards to lesser regression with each residue; it's quite good now.

It is going to meet our company's needs moving forward. In fact, we recently attended a conference to develop and deploy additional features on Service Anywhere and to take full power of the tool. It's fully scalable.

The technical support could be better. The ticket tracking process is sometimes not done properly. It requires you to open a defect and then you get feedback that it is not produced. You discover that the defect is resolved when you read the release notes but you didn't receive any answer from the support team. However, the support will close the defect after the question is already delivered officially.

The setup of the solution is quite easy. There is no need to have high development skills in order to set up this solution. All you need is some logic and then you can apply it directly.

Today, we're looking for a solution that is not too complex. We already have a strategy to go into cloud so we're searching for a cloud solution that will allow us to deploy directly out-of-the-box. We don't want to customize the solution or stay very close to the initial solution.

The most valuable feature that I can see in Service Anywhere is the link to the ETL process. The way that you can manage requests and incidents then link it to a problem it recognizes, and then be able to integrate change in the full process. Also the capitalization with the knowledge, which is really important for the process.

The benefits for the company is the ability to reuse the knowledge that you can capitalize on the entire process and be able to share the same process worldwide for all of our countries.

When HPE upgrades the tool we get the new functionalities automatically, and that's very interesting for us.

We are looking forward to the mobile application. However, this application won't be enough for us. We need additional features in the mobile application to be able to get ourselves the survey like we had on the web application. Additional capabilities in the instructions we have done on our offerings.

Well, it depends on the phases. We were an early adopter and at the beginning it was rather complicated. Now things are getting better. However, there are still some improvements needed, but things are getting better.

It's been able to scale.

We are working very closely with the R&D team. We are talking about lots of features, about architecture, about response time and new functionalities. We usually ask them and raise issues or new wishes for the coming improvements and the future release.

The implementation itself was quite easy, and in the beginning there were only a few functionalities. The complexity came later when we had the big upgrades with new functionalities, and at such times we faced some issues.

In the beginning, we studied the different solutions that were available on the market. In fact, the strategy of the company was to use a SaaS solution. Also, we wanted to be very close to the standard solution because previously we had an on-premise solution, with which we made so many customizations that we could not upgrade anymore. It was a kind of big project due to the number of specifics that we made on the tool. Another reason was the detail solution, it was very close to the process we wanted. Finally, it was the pricing, as we felt it was much more valuable to go with this solution rather than another one.

HPE was one vendor like the others, but we had the opportunity as the solution was not very old, it was quite a young solution, so we could work very closely with the R&D team, and it was very important for us. We could have an impact on the roadmap and the new functionalities. HPE priorities were the same as ours, so that was quite good. They had some very good new solutions, such as big data, Vertica and so on, which were very interesting for us as well.

This is a good solution for us. It still has things to improve, but it's a good solution.

Big data and analytics are the product’s most valuable features.

Since the Service Anywhere (SAW) implementation, we have improved in two major aspects:

• User experience: SAW’s self-service portal has provided valuable information to the users, a single point of contact and knowledge base access.
• Efficiency: Big data functions and analytics provided valuable information for decision-making about the capacity of human resources.

Integration: The integration capacity of the tool is limited. It supports REST/API integration, but it has many limitations. The clearest example is the SAW-HP PPM integration. You can build an integration between the two platforms, but this will not provide much value because there is limited data available.

I have used it for two years.

This SaaS solution only supports ADFS technology and doesn’t support VPN connections.

Online support or SaaS support is really good.

We choose this product because we needed a SaaS solution and this platform has many valuable functions that our previous tool didn’t, such as a training self-service portal, big data & analytics, knowledge base and “real” ITIL compliance. ITIL processes modeled in SAW are REALLY good. I think that you can have a good processes model just by using out-of-the-box SAW processes.

It was a straightforward setup. If you are implementing new processes, you can use out of the box models. If you want to build custom processes and business rules that may be as complex as you want, I recommend having ITSM expert consulting support during the project.

We did the implementation directly with HP. HP Latin America consultants do not have the required skills and knowledge for SAW implementation or it was insufficient.

I recommend reviewing your IT processes before implementation begins to identify gaps and set realistic goals. I think that it could be helpful to have ITIL-trained staff and not forget the importance of MoC (organizational change) planning and support.

Self service portal and speed of development

Easier access to data and for reporting which gives the data for managing IT. It has provided us with a very good change management process.

The process of moving updates from development to production.

Nearly two years

Deployment went according to plan once we sorted out how we wanted the processes to work.

None

Getting better

Very good

The previous solution was provided as part of a managed service. It did not have a change management module and was very difficult to get management reports from it.

The initial set up was kept simple as there were very tight timescales.

We implemented the system ourselves with some help from HPE.

It has a very flexible pricing structure so make sure you understand it fully before committing.

We evaluated:

HP Service Manager - Too mature for the state of service management in our company

ServiceNow - Too expensive and implementation too complex for our timescales

OTRIS - Implementation too complex for our timescales

Go for it.