ServiceNow Now Platform Reviews

ServiceNow is our ticket management and remediation system. We use it for other things as needed. We have about 400-500 people on the project management side. 

ServiceNow can document and produce a historical working tool that deals with projects themselves. The user interface is another strong suit. 

It is still difficult to build a set of services in ServiceNow. It can be done, but it is one of the more difficult things to do. If we're talking about scalability, we're talking about the ability to actually build that set of services a little easier.

I've been using ServiceNow since I joined the company in March of last year.

I rate ServiceNow 10 out of 10 for stability. You only need to go through updates once or twice to realize ServiceNow is a highly stable platform and continues to be one.

I rate ServiceNow nine out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate ServiceNow nine out of 10 for ease of setup. We didn't have any issues. 

I rate ServiceNow Now Platform 10 out of 10. I've seen various CMDBs like it, and ServiceNow is everything we're looking for. 

I am actually a development expert within the ServiceNow platform. So I implemented ServiceNow for some of our customers as well as within our company. I help them to implement some applications customers and configure what they need from the suite of management applications available within ServiceNow.  

The most important thing we use this solution for is IT service management where users implement processes like incident management, problem management, or chain management. Incident management and problem management at its simplest can be a system whereby any user in an organization can report a defect. Say I am a user and my email is not working and I want to raise a ticket to get the problem solved. I use ServiceNow for raising that ticket. Another example is that if I want to implement new software, I need may need to raise a change request, so I do that in ServiceNow. 

We are always on the latest version. There is a new version every six months, so there are two releases every year. That means every time there is a new release I have to upgrade, update my knowledge about the changes by becoming familiar with the changes, and then we have to upgrade the program for the customers as well.  

The workflow feature really has a lot of value because you can create workflows in a simple, intuitive way. With a few clicks, you can actually develop quite a complex workflow using tool and product life cycles and so on. So, the workflow feature, in my opinion, is the strongest feature in the ServiceNow platform.  

There are several areas of the product that could use improvement. From a vendor point of view, I had an opportunity to work with them on their licensing model. It still needs some improvement in the way the licensing model works because it is a little bit complex and difficult to understand. They change it from time-to-time and sometimes they do not communicate those changes effectively to their partners. Put simply, the licensing model is something that can be simplified and made more visible to both the partners and the customers or end-users. Currently, the product is comparatively quite expensive and lowering the cost would likely produce a better response from customers.  

I know that the company is at work on many new things right now. But one thing I would expect to see in the next few releases is vertical-specific solutions. For example, say solutions for banking or healthcare-specific solutions. I believe they are going to come up with at least a draft version of this type of solution for some industries over the next few releases.  

We have been using this solution since about 2016. So it is almost four years now.  

I have complete confidence in the stability of the platform. It is very stable.  

ServiceNow is very easy to scale — that is if the customer has the money to spend. It is quite easy to take on new licenses. It is very scalable.  

Our customers can be any size business but in my personal experience, I work with medium to large customers. The solution is something that is used on a daily basis.  

We have been in touch with their technical support and it is quite responsive and they are very good about providing solutions. We have a dedicated technical support desk that is quite approachable. For now, everything is quite good.  

Before ServiceNow, I used other solutions, but mostly they were custom-built applications. For example, I used to code and develop an application from scratch. ServiceNow is the first product I have used software that is a dedicated service desk product.  

I would say that from my point of view that configuring ServiceNow is pretty simple. But there are also a lot of things to consider. If you want to build a complex system, the configuration process can be complex as well. If you understand the software, you get a standard set of functionalities, but you can configure that for your own needs. For example, I had a situation where I knew a particular customer had some different requirements than what was provided out-of-the-box for the standard version. In this case, I was able to configure ServiceNow to match their needs. I can write complex scripts or I can do programming to build new processes within ServiceNow. But the implementation is different for every customer.  

How long the implementation takes becomes a very open-ended question because they have so much existing functionality already in the product that may need to be configured and the need for customization depends on the user's requirements. There are so many factors involved that I can not really define an absolute amount of time required for standard implementation. It depends on the use case. The basic installation of the application itself can be done in ten minutes and the solution can be made to be up and running within three months. However, if you want to have a complex, custom-built chain management process, it can take years.  

I am from a software development company and I work as a consultant as well as an architect for projects. Our operating model is that we work directly with the customer and we do the consultancy, we get into workshops with customers and discover their requirements and then our development team starts working on those requirements. So we have two levels. One is as a consultant who helps to finalize the requirements and the other is as developers who satisfy the requirements that have been defined.  

As far as how many people it takes for the deployment of the platform, that can not be determined as a set number either as it requires knowing the scope of the project and perhaps other factors like the expected timeline.  

We use a public cloud, but as our customer, you get a private instance. So you can think of it as an environment you can have in the cloud that is indicated for a particular customer.  As a customer, you do not get visibility as to whether it is in a public or private cloud. From a customer point of view, you do not know that or it is invisible to you. But in the backend, it now maintains their data and the platform using both AWS and Azure in the background and they use the cloud for that.  

The licensing price for ServiceNow is somewhat high. The pricing depends on the number of users. For a similar type of application, the price of licensing for ServiceNow is on the high side. Actually it is 20% to 30% more than the nearest competitor.  

There are technically not any additional costs besides the licensing fees from a customer point of view for the product. But, if they want to implement an application in ServiceNow, they may also have to pay for a developer's team to implement the solution. Once development is complete, they probably have to spend some amount for supporting and maintaining the application and customization, so that will also be included as an additional cost for the company using the solution even if it is not a direct cost for the product.  

We have evaluated other products but within my company, I only work with the ServiceNow project and I have been doing this for the last four years. Sometimes part of our customer engagement requires that we do comparative studies. For example, we had a request from a client to do a feature comparison with the Pega platform. I got some detailed information from Pega's product development and other resources to compare with ServiceNow and did the comparison in that way. But in terms of development or implementation experience, I do not have any direct experience with Pega.  

The foremost thing I would like to recommend to people considering ServiceNow is not to try to reconfigure or customize the out-of-the-box process too much. Stick to the out-of-the-box processes that are provided as much as possible and use minimal customizations. We used to say to our customers to use maximum configuration but minimum customization.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the ServiceNow product overall as at least an eight.  

Currently, I work with ITSM and HR modules in ServiceNow, with some integrations with other third-party solutions, and the core of my experience is based on that.

For example, my recent project is related to HR, and we are helping the customer define all the HR processes based on the customer's requirements. We have managed all the cases in the organization for 120,000 users. It's a global client in the world, and we are responsible for creating and defining all the processes to manage all the cases in the organization.

In HR, we are across all the features of the HR model. We have created the portals for each one of the countries in the customer and all the service catalogs. After that, for particular customer processes, we are using HR to define them and implement them in that firm.

The simplicity is great. Based on my experience with other solutions in the market, the most important is the simplicity of implementing all the features that we have in ServiceNow and helping customers to simplify the work process in the daily journeys that they have.

It is easy to set up the product.

The interface is perfect.

It's very stable.

The scalability is great.

In ServiceNow, it's difficult to mention some points, as I have other experiences with other solutions, and the gap between ServiceNow and the other ones is huge. There are no missing features. 

The price is a bit high and can be a bit of a barrier for some customers.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution is very stable. You are talking about 99.9% of the stability that that solution has. It's great.

The solution can scale well. It is very good.

They offer very good support. With ServiceNow we can define priorities based on impact and the urgency in our cases. We are open to ServiceNow support and ServiceNow manages responses very well.

The implementation of the process is very straightforward and simple. 

How many people you need for deployment and maintenance depends on if you are looking only for the base implementation. I'd say two or three people are enough to deploy the solution. It does vary based on the requirements of the project and customer, however, two or three people are enough.

The solution is very expensive. 

We are a partner. We deal with different versions of the product. Right now, we are using San Diego.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's not something for everybody. However, we have a team of people that can justify a proof of concept. The company needs to be mature to get some real functionality out of it. If the company doesn't have the maturity, it may be a bad investment. 

The solution utilizes SOPs to automate their business management processes, which are automated through various features of the ServiceNow platform, such as playbooks and other tools. They come from various domains. Based on their business requirements, they approach us with implementation requests, and that's where we assist.

There are several business cases in which we have implemented automation utilizing the out-of-the-box capabilities of the ServiceNow platform.

Cost savings are the main improvement area. It saves 30% time if you need to work with two different systems simultaneously and lack integration. Otherwise, you would have to maintain the data on both ends manually. Integration can help save this kind of time.

Since our platform is always evolving, the integration capabilities help customers expand their requirements based on increased scalability. As a service provider company, we assist our customers in continually enhancing their needs, as they have ever-evolving requirements. This necessitates us to adapt platform features to meet their demands continually.

We have a support division for our end customers, which provides support services on the platform. It has a technical support team available. In case of any issues, we can raise tickets through a customizable dashboard, and they respond by troubleshooting and resolving the problems.

Positive

ServiceNow's Now Platform utilizes different deployable environments like development, staging, and production. Specific standard processes facilitate these deployments, resulting in a highly standardized workflow.

The product is expensive.

We have previously integrated ServiceNow's Now Platform with various third-party applications, such as Salesforce and some of our customers' legacy applications. This enables centralized control over operations, consolidating disparate systems into a unified interface rather than requiring users to navigate different platforms simultaneously.

We have some sort of AI initiative, but a separate division within our company handles AI data analytics and related tasks. It boasts out-of-the-box AI capabilities, such as automating searches based on AI. Additionally, some chatbots automatically identify customers' needs based on their questions. So, the platform already has these features in place.

It's a continuously evolving platform, and new features are added with each release. This upgrade does not cause issues.

ServiceNow is one example of the platforms we've used to manage engineers throughout entire projects.

As a ServiceNow partner company, we recommend our end customers utilize this tool.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The incident management has been the most useful feature for us.

I want ServiceNow to be more customizable, especially the incident management module. The fields cannot be added right now. If you want the users to input different kinds of fields which are specific to a certain product, it is difficult to do.

I have been using this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support of ServiceNow is really good. I'm very happy with it.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The pricing of this solution is done annually and it is very expensive.

This is a great workflow tool that offers great support. The reporting capabilities need to be improved, otherwise we need to pay for performance analytics. 

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We use this solution for taking calls, logging calls, and assigning calls.

We have just moved over to ServiceNow Out-of-the-Box, which is the general platform.

This solution is deployed in a hybrid-cloud environment.

In the past, we only had a solution that we could use locally. This solution has helped us to go global with our IT service management support. We were able to scale it much quicker and support the organization globally.

We have seen a big improvement in the experience that we want to create for our end users. The catalog used to be separated from the IT service, but now we have both of them running from the same platform. This means that we can quickly deploy solutions based on the request from our users.

The integration makes it easier for the end-users, as they can track the status of their incidents and their requests, and they can put in a new request. This one platform, where the end-users can manage all of their demands and see all of their devices, including their cell phone contracts, makes our lives easy. The end-users used to have multiple reference numbers and now there is one that a request or incident is linked to. They get updates, similar to the Amazon platform, where you can see the status of your order and you know how far away they are.

The most valuable feature of this solution is cataloging the requests, which allows us to speed up the process and improve the user experience.

The knowledge management feature is now continuously learning from incidents.

In the next release of this solution, we would like to see mobile capability.

We would like to see AI used to automate some of the functionality in this solution.

We are impressed with the stability of this platform. We are part of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Even with multiple languages, it was easy to adopt and to provide users in their respective countries with language enabled according to their needs.

This is a very scalable solution.

Technical support for this solution is excellent. We have had the technologists visit us. They were part of the implementation. Overall, the support we are receiving from this vendor is excellent.

When we implemented and set up this solution for the first time, we did some customization. Now that we have adopted the Out-of-the-Box version, it means less customization. We are taking an "As-Is" solution so that we can use more capabilities for customizing it.

We made use of a service integrator to assist us with the implementation and deployment. We didn't deploy with our own team. These people were qualified and know the product very well, so our experience was very good. The platform providers were also supporting the service integrators.

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution, but we found this to be an excellent product. We call it the SAP of IT Management.

We chose this product mainly because of the capabilities that it offered, and how they matched what we needed.

The biggest lesson that we learned through implementing this solution is that it is important not to customize. Rather, take the product offering best practices and adopt it with its own processes. This makes scaling much easier. Whereas if you customize it and if you build your own version, it becomes difficult to scale, support, and do the official upgrades. This is why we have taken the Out-of-the-Box version and have adopted the processes that come with it. It is working and we don't have to change it too much.

This is a very good solution, but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I am primarily using ServiceNow Now Platform for IT service management.

The most valuable features are the ease of use, stability, and the ability to change or upgrade seamlessly.

The analytics should be more readily available on the base product. Historical data isn't as easily available as expected and it requires buying additional licenses for more features.

I have been using it for nine months.

ServiceNow Now Platform is fairly stable.

The platform is fairly scalable, and I haven't experienced any limitations.

The customer service and support are fairly good. I haven't had any issues with regards to the support part.

Positive

I have not really used previous solutions.

The initial setup has been easy, with not many complications.

A team that knows what they're doing is needed to do the installation.

It's difficult to put a return on investment value on it as it's fairly early in the journey, less than a year.

ServiceNow Now Platform is an expensive product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I mainly use Now Platform for change management and IT services, like if there are any issues with logins.

Now Platform's best features are collaboration, configurability, and customizability. I also like that there are multiple ways you can access ServiceNow data through the API.

I've been working with Now Platform for two months.

Now Platform is very stable.

Now Platform is scalable.

I previously worked with BMC Remedy, but I prefer Now Platform as it's more user-friendly.

The initial setup requires a lot of customization based on the individual company's processes. I would say the setup process is medium complex and would rate it as three out of five.

I would give Now Platform a rating of nine out of ten.