ServiceNow Reviews

I like the out of the box module processes like the incident problem change. Currently, I think the most powerful features are discovery, orchestration, the business map of the relationships, and building applications for business. The business applications has been in place for a year, and we have new customers, so we want to make business applications not only for IT but for other departments in the company.

With it, I can do everything. I have some questions, requirements, from the customers. I never say to the customer, "I can't do it." That's because I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow. Even if something doesn't work now, I know that in the next few months it will.

From the customer perspective, I think the most important aspect is that they know what they're paying for. They pay once a year which makes it easy to plan financially. They know the costs of using ServiceNow, because you don't need extra resources, servers, backups etc. as everything is in the cloud.

From my perspective as a partner, I can do everything with ServiceNow so I don't stress about telling a customer during a meeting that I can do something even if I think I can't. Everything is possible and it's only limited by the imagination of myself and the developers.

I think that it goes too fast sometimes and they have too many releases too often. Sometimes there are bugs, maybe not making it unstable, but we need to change some customer customizations. For example, there are problems with the performance, so if ServiceNow is changing something such as data centers there can be issues. Availability is perfect of this platform. Genius, as I said at the beginning.

The only bugs are related to the configuration, not from the ServiceNow side, but from the partners that are doing something because they don't understand how it works.

It's small issues. Not a big impact for production instances and for the current work.

I worked with HP Service Manager. I know that BMC Remedy is quite similar in functionality to ServiceNow. They are trying to be in the same space but with HP Service Manager, I know there is a problem. For example, my previous company decided to go forward with ServiceNow as it had a service catalog. The Service Catalog functionality wasn't working in HP Service Manager, so they decided to switch to ServiceNow.

It depends. From my perspective, it's easy, I am a system architect, and I think from a customer perspective it's easy as well. I can see a new custom application created in a simpler way, for building applications, etc. but I'm usually only using the basic functionality, which I started to work with at the beginning because it's easier and I know that I can control it. From the user perspective, I can see that they are adding new forms to configure everything.

It's genius and there is no risk from the IT manager perspective. The management team of a company isn't at risk either and the future is always promising.

You can be sure that if you invest in ServiceNow the entire company will be happy. Always have a good partner to develop the instance and everything will be fine. For IT management, it's not risky to experiment with ServiceNow.

I would give it a ten. It's the best, from my perspective, especially compared with the IT systems I've worked with before.

I like the flexibility on ServiceNow. We use it for our help desk admin and our call center, but we also use it for our knowledge management system. Right now our knowledge management system is our growth area. We get to add our custom homemade apps plus some of the other vendor apps, to integrate into that to get our total package that we need. We have multiple enterprise applications so we're moving data back and forth between all of them all the time, so ServiceNow is great for that part.

Previously we used some other applications, some are homemade, some not, but as they updated the applications, they didn't keep up with how our actual strategy and how our organization worked with. So far we've been with ServiceNow for many years and every time they've had an update, it's been fairly seamless for us.

Somehow if there was a roadmap for ServiceNow to show all of the different business domains and everything and what may be included and what you have or what might could be upgraded to support you in those areas. Show me a roadmap and I'll look at different business processes and how ServiceNow would handle those.

We've only had network issues, and we've never had any latency issues. It's always just if the network is down is our only problem. We have had bugginess, but we're going to get too technical for me. It's part of the integration between ServiceNow and Genesis and IVR. There were some issues but they were very technical in nature.

The scalability is fine.

I don't have direct experience with them. I have six coordinators and two of them in particular work really well with ServiceNow. If they've had an issue or had a question, they've had it corrected, resolved fairly quickly.

I've used BMC Remedy which I hate, and the others were just homemade.

The complexity was not complex for ServiceNow, it was just wrapping our heads around it. We have over 120 different platforms and variations of those and we have probably 300 core sites, so to be able to pull together everything we wanted for our ticking system and to relate that with knowledge management was just a challenge for us to pull our process together.

You should look at ServiceNow and at the business processes. If a roadmap was available it would be very easy for you to choose one and implement that first, and as they go along pick up another one.

We have our own development groups so obviously we can customize stuff well, where others probably can't, so I prefer my custom apps, but if I take that away I'd probably give ServiceNow an eight and a half, or nine. I consider my custom apps probably seven and a half. I need to learn also how to integrate some of our custom apps to start working within ServiceNow and those too. That's a short fall in my experience.

Because I do IT planning and program management, the project portfolio management part is most helpful and useful, but I can also see the integration to other parts of the IT operation as well. I think that's most useful because we are looking from an end-to-end perspective within the IT organization, though we may have different functional teams, but we are working as one team, so it's important that the various operations or processes are tied and integrated into one platform, in one end-to-end process.

I can see a very good product strategy. We see enhancements or enhanced features in each of the releases. I see the roadmap is good and the technology underneath is also good.

During the Knowledge16 conference, I found out more about the IT financial management part, which is important to me because we're trying to do more finance on our IT operations so that we can measure performance. We can also share info with our business shareholders and stakeholders as well. I see those features as really useful when we transform our IT organization into a service organization.

In our region we don't have many choices of implementation partners. At the same time, I don't see that they are as proficient as they are in other regions.

Today we aren't seeing major issues but one of our concern is that it's expensive.

Not at this company, but beforehand I had used Remedy. It is a very traditional IT Service Management tool, basically a help desk, but I think there's a lot more in ServiceNow.

The underlying technology and also the application or customization facility, or the technology behind ServiceNow actually is quite robust and quite agile, which we can make use of to do a release and deliver it quickly.

We're using Deloitte as our implementation partner. They are doing a fantastic job, but they're just one particular resource, one or two that can help us, but in our region, we don't have many choices on partners that are proficient in ServiceNow as well as in IT operations.

We are trying to do it in a phased approach, we want to have the initial system for us, and then we'll use it and improve-enhance it later on. I don't see that we'll have major issues, because our goal is not to have it all in one step, but rather we are evolving our solution.

I do not have particular details, but what I heard from my boss is that it's not a cheap solution, especially when you want to roll out to more people or more colleagues in an organization. That is really a significant factor we're considering because in terms of the cost it's not cheap, so we hesitate. We can see a lot of scalability and expansion possibility in rolling out beyond the IT organization.

Over the two years that we've had ServiceNow up and running, we've had a couple of service interruptions. Other than that, no. Some kind of network problem they were having, they had to fall back into a different data center, and that took about 15 minutes, I wish it was a little bit seamless, but we've had a couple of glitches.

The ability to add more users to the system itself, what we have done is we've linked it to our active directory, and that's where we're importing the user information from, and that's been working great for us.

Our company is basically a group of companies, it's not just one company, so our IT infrastructure and department and the way we operate is very fragmented. One of our goals is to combine them into one enterprise.

We are actually using about 26 different ITSM tools and we are in the process of eliminating them all. Over the past two years we have been able to get rid of five of them, and we're continually working towards off-lining the rest as well. The biggest one that we currently use is Maximal, I believe IBM uses that, that's who we deal with, and it's still there.

I wasn't with that company when they were implementing it, so I'm not exactly sure. As I was joining them, they were deploying their first module which was the incident module. Others have been very easy since I've been there, they did knowledge, they did change, and they developed a custom application, which after a little while ServiceNow provided free of charge, so that was kind of always, but we're still using the custom one. As far as deploying and developing goes within ServiceNow it's very easy, not painful at all. The only pain point for us is because we're a group of different companies, our collection of requirements is a little bit lengthy, it requires a little bit more work than other companies. The incident module itself alone is very complex because we have several service desks at several locations and fairly complicated.

I would advise you to stay out of the box as much as possible. I know it is very difficult to do that, but if you stay out of the box and go with minimum customization it would be the best, because when you upgrade to the next version, our next release or example, we will encounter issues if you have customized it, and you'll have to fix that. Also as far as testing goes, try to automate it. Because that's right now a challenge for us, a regression test.

I find the product to be valuable because even before they started really pushing it as a platform as a service, that is the biggest reason as to why I leaned towards its purchase two years ago; it's platform as a service. We didn't really purchase it as a SAS product. It's valuable to us because we do a lot of custom development on the platform.

We could have chosen many different platforms but for lack of a better word, it was the easiest to be able to move to, taking all of our existing processes and data from different sources. It was born in the cloud so we didn't have to worry about all of the nuances of being able to ensure that it would work as a cloud application. That was a big piece and it already had a service, although rudimentary, a service portal available with it. I think in the previous versions it's referred to as an ESS portal. With Fuji on forward I think they refer to it as a service portal.

If you look at the number of support calls that we put into ServiceNow, it's absolutely minimal because we filter. We don't have our users calling into ServiceNow directly and we trained our users, etc. I don't really see the value, monetarily, from what we're spending from a support perspective. Because if we call into ServiceNow it's because we're experiencing something at a much higher level, not something that is an easy fix. It's usually we've recognized performance issues or something like that. Their up time has been satisfactory for the most part.

For the most part, the product is very stable. We host customers ourselves and we know how difficult it is. As a host provider you're not completely 100% in control of everything, you're dependent on other vendors to be up.

We've had three major upgrades since we implemented and there have been no issues. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we followed a very regimented custom development best practice so that we wouldn't interfere with any of their upgrade processes.

It does not necessarily scale from a licensed user perspective, we don't grow as much because our license users are really just our core set of resources within our company that's internal. From an external customer perspective, our customers are international/worldwide, so we have folks from Africa, Singapore, London accessing the system. We went from an initial 8,000 users to double that amount from an external customer.

We also continue to use our own application that we develop which supplements ServiceNow.

We had a lot pushing us to go very fast so we implemented ServiceNow in less than a 90-day period once we actually started progressing to actual implementation. Some portions of just deciding upon the product and all of that took much longer, but once we procured the product and actually set on our way to implement, in less than 90 days we were live.

Advice to peers: It would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. It really would depend on the problems they're trying to solve. As an ITSM solution, I would highly recommend it, first choice. For something else, it would depend.

Our primary use case is comprehensive reporting for our business and our regulators.

We began by extending ServiceNow capabilities within IT, which gave us a clear understanding of what we could do with it, and then expanded from there. We had many business processes that ran on legacy systems and spreadsheets. That created unacceptable risk and cost. That means we can focus on core functionality rather than having to build all of the application scaffolding and platform capabilities by ourselves

ServiceNow is the central hub for our data services. It takes in orders from our front-end CRM system and drives end-to-end fulfillment workflows. That starts with entitlements, which is checking whether a customer has all the necessary contracts in place. For example, if we’re providing access to third-party content, does the customer have appropriate contracts with the content vendor?

Then, we use ServiceNow to orchestrate the actual technical fulfillment process. This includes ordering circuits to connect to the customer’s premises and configuring our own backend systems, which ties into our core IT processes on ServiceNow. Once the service is up and running, ServiceNow provides reporting and notifications to support billing and financial forecasting.

ServiceNow gives us a lot for free: workflows, organizational structures, service portal, forms, reporting, disaster recovery, and so on. That means we can focus on core functionality rather than having to build all the application scaffolding and platform capabilities by ourselves. That saves us at least 50% on development effort, and because we’ve got a consistent platform framework, we also get a lot of reuse. That makes it easy to consolidate and retire applications built on legacy tools.

For example, Lotus Notes; we can modernize and save costs. In fact, since we started out, we’ve built more than 20 custom ServiceNow apps and our team is still fewer than 10 people, including QA.

Integration capabilities can improve. ServiceNow has a roadmap, however, native integrations in addition to the citizen-developed scopes would be ideal.

The pricing seems confusing, with the integration hub being most confusing.

I believe our firewall rule change request form is a custom form, but it has a serious drawback. If I submit such a request and need to make a correction to it before it is approved, there isn't any way for me to do so. The request has to first be rejected with the creation of a sub-task in order to edit it before it is resubmitted for approval.

We have been using ServiceNow for two years.

Stability-wise, this product is very good.

The scalability is good.

The technical support is very good.

This is a SaaS product. The customization and development of custom apps bit time-consuming.

Our deployment was vendor assisted. It was expensive but good.

I am not in the finance department; however, incident reporting and resolution have been much better.

The setup cost is high compared to others, especially when the scope is not fixed.

We looked at several options and decided that ServiceNow was the best choice. And it was because the rollout was highly successful.

The new developer tools with Geneva have been the most valuable so far. The community is really good too. There's not a lot of tools that I've been an administrator of where the community really helps out like ServiceNow’s does.

I'm not sure about additional features because really, if you need something, you can build it in ServiceNow so that's pretty neat in itself. Working out some of the things that people might have headaches about and for access to certain things in the workflow, like the delivery time and being able to set that dynamically on a request item would be nice. As far as new features, it looks like they're going the right direction. They have ideas that I haven't even thought of.

I've used it for a little over a year.

It has. With the new update in Geneva, there's a few snags with the presence, but they're getting that ironed out. As far as up-time goes, it's always been available.

We haven't needed to scale yet and right now our licenses aren't size-based as far as storage-based goes. I haven't really seen a need to scale at the moment.

Very good. I've worked with other vendors in the past that haven't been nearly as good as ServiceNow's, like CA technologies and SolarWinds. ServiceNow is way better.

I previously used CA UIM. CA didn't really know what was going on and a lot of the stuff they promised was really not working properly. They got us in the contract, though, so it's too late.

I wasn't at the company when the initial setup took place, so I can't really speak on that. As far as upgrades go, it's pretty straightforward. Doesn't take too long and generally goes smoothly.

We will eventually upgrade to Helsinki. I guess we can do it now if we wanted, but we just switched everybody from Fuji to Geneva and getting everybody used to that. The UI hasn't changed a whole lot, but one of the sessions coming up [at Knowledge 16] is the Helsinki features. I'm going to take a look and decide from there whether we should push it quicker or not.

I'd tell them to stay out of the box as much as possible. We've had it for quite a while, I think since 2005. Out of the box as much as possible because once you start developing and making stuff your own and then some cool new features come down the line. It makes a lot of work to look at backing out stuff so you can implement the new features from ServiceNow and then maybe eventually putting your stuff back in. Just stay out of the box as much as possible, alleviate headaches.

Integration - we started off at ITIL processes, but now we're looking at integrating it with other aspects of our business. We're on-boarding CMDBs so that we know what we have. On the other side of that, we can tie those into those processes that we already have so that we can actually see incidents across which devices or if there were changes made to those devices that correlated back to those incidents and stuff like that.

More out of the box stuff, but then again it's so customizable that you can make it do what you need it to do even if it didn't come with it.

I've used it for a little bit short of a year. My company has used it for four years.

It's been constantly stable. I wouldn't say never any down time, but I would say that we're usually at four nines.

I would say most certainly it's scaleable.

With my interactions with them, I would say that they're really good. I almost never have to escalate anything. It's usually the person that responds to me helps me out pretty quick.

Upgrades can be kind of painful. ServiceNow is a great product because you can do almost anything with it. On the flip side of that, it's kind of horrible because you can do almost anything with it. The more you customize stuff, the more effort there is in upgrading to see what isn't getting upgraded because you've customized it and then to work out what you have to do.

My advice would be to do it, not knowing obviously what their ITIL processes are beforehand. I would say, "Get ready to ride the roller coaster," because, like I said before, you can do almost anything with it, which is also a downfall because when we started we were doing just incident change and problem. Now we're doing incident change, problem, project, self-service portal, CMDB discovery, service mapping, even management. It grows exponentially. You have to try to keep up with all those pieces.