ServiceNow Reviews

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.

In my role it would be Demand and Project because I'm a project manager.

I attended some of the sessions about Helsinki and I think some might be addressed there - reporting and Gantt charts. Calendar views - there are no nice calendar views and I think I'm just starting to learn about resource management but it would be nice for them to have the roadmaps so you can see an actual calendar view to see where from a project, (not necessarily resource but project) wear you are. Calendar views would be a huge addition.

Our company's been using it about two years, myself I've been using it about a year and a half.

No downtime that I know of.

It's a scalable product and we see it scaling for us.

I haven't been involved a lot with the support. I think that's going to change and I think I will get involved more but for right now I don't know that we've had issues. I haven't heard of any so I'm assuming we haven't.

I'll go out on the Wiki and look for answers and I might jump over to the community to try to find information.

For the first portion of it, I know we had a lot of internal change management so it took a little bit longer but they rolled it out all at once. I think it took about six months but I wasn't here for that. We rolled out Project and Demand and we did it in two months.

Go for it. I actually said that to someone who's nervous about doing it. Get everybody on it, don't do it piecemeal.

One of the gals that did a presentation [at Knowledge 16] said they're using demand and project but still using Microsoft Project. Don't do that, put it all in Servicenow. Even though it may be a little clunky in certain places, it helps to have one tool and everything in one place.

It's ease of use, extensibility and just the ability to take it out of the box and use it with minimal custom configuration.

The documentation needs work. The wiki is woefully inadequate. I support federal customers, there's a separate US government approval process to use instances, and we're behind the rest of the public community. For instance, we don't even have permission to use Geneva yet, and Helsinki is already out. I know they're working on it and it's going to be faster, but right now it's a challenge. You see all these new features and we can't go out and use them until the government says we can.

I've been using it since 2009.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scaler for our needs.

They're inconsistent. Depending on who you get, they may or may not be able to immediately provide the kind of response you need and sometimes they take a while to do it.

I wouldn't say that I use the community a lot. I think our developers do, and I'm not a developer. They go out and use it more than I do.

It was easy to set up.

I would recommend it. I think the biggest challenge with all of the functionality that exists in ServiceNow today is to figure out where to start, and having a narrow strategy so that when you do buy it you don't try to do everything at once and get nothing done. A lot of the sessions around here [at Knowledge16] have done a good job in outlining that and driving their experience. I definitely recommend it.

It's very easy to customize and build off of. It's a simple platform to get up to speed on. Every company I've worked for has enjoyed their idle focus. The usability is a valuable feature, a lot of customers just enjoy the usability of it.

Since I've been working with the product for a long time, it feel like in the old days it was kind of a smaller, cult-like following. You had a more family-like community. Now it's gotten so big and it's kind of lost a little bit of that. I guess that's good for their business.

They seem to be trying to branch out and do a lot more than just ITSM which is usually what the core focus is, so sometimes there might be a little bit less emphasis on that. Personally I haven't seen that, but other people have mentioned it. It'll be interesting if they try to be all things to all people. They've gotten more polished, more professional, larger and a lot more sales-oriented when they went public. I don't really have many bad things to say about them.

I've personally used it since 2007. I worked at a company called Progress Energy. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were an early adopter and we luckily fell into it at the right time.

It was never bad, but in the early days there was definitely more outages, and we had an SLA. I think initially we even got some money back from them in the early early days in Progress. I'd say over the past five years or so that the reliability's been excellent.

I've had no issues with scaling, especially in the last five years. Availability seems to really have helped. We still have some performance issues, but sometimes those could be network related and not vendor related. Sometimes it's our development which is causing the trouble. I would not blame ServiceNow for any kind of performance issues that we've had.

Currently, we're not really scaled up at this particular point, so I don't foresee that being an issue, but we could encounter that later.

I'd say it's fairly good. The bigger they've got, the more I guess standardized their high systems become. Usually if we have something that really shows up on our radar, we can get a hold of somebody and get it addressed. In the earlier days when we had more of those, we also had pretty good luck at being able to get some senior engineers on problems that we had, even if they were self-inflicted problems.

We've used ServiceNow professional services and I've really enjoyed working with them and some of the other high-level partners, but to be honest with you, my current company isn't big on contractors. It's kind of an act of parliament to get them to bring somebody in from outside.

Being more technical myself, would say that having a clear and consistent view of your requirements, what you want to do, and to try to stay out of the box at first as much as possible. This is the third company I've worked for who uses ServiceNow and we always try to over-customize it at first, because everybody has very defined processes. Over-customization of the tool will hamstring you in how you can take advantage of stuff that they release. They always seem to release something that you're wanting to build right after you build it.

It's been a challenge because a lot of people think they know better, and everybody does it their own way. Staying out of the box initially is really helpful. Any tool can be made bad if you put garbage in. That's the biggest issue I've seen.

The ease of use, as for us it's sort of like Lego. If somebody wants something, if they want some automation, if they want workflow, etc. It's cool that if you can imagine it you can probably build it fairly easily.

It's very, very cost effective. We're able to replace traditional FTE dollars and spend on ServiceNow at a fraction of the cost. I believe when it was initially implemented there was an immediate reduction of one to two people.

I'd like to have an offline mode. For us, we do a lot of workforce management. We've got a lot of guys out in the field in remote locations. Getting them into the system is good, it's beneficial for us. Good forms and get that data in. If they're out on site, they can't access the system.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I think that's one of the key things with that tool is all of those considerations and problems go away.

It's infinitely scalable, we've had no performance issues.

It can be both straightforward or complex. Probably one of the easiest ones that I've done was Greenfield. They didn't have ServiceNow at the time. They only wanted a project management solution. That's it. That was very, very small, very straightforward. Then I did one for a company in Australia called TXA. They do a lot of the television transmission equipment and it was end to end automating ticket creation based on an event log. A very, very bespoke and complicated event log.

It was very particular as there are a lot of concepts very particular to their business. It was very, very interesting but it was incredibly complex. They wanted as much of hands off and let the system sort it out as possible. Most implementations are fairly similar.

Some advice that I've heard -  get people hands on with it as early as possible. I find a I go through requirements with a user or with a company that they get, and they'll think that it's solid. As soon as they start playing with ServiceNow they realize "hang on, maybe I can get it to do this, I can change this. "The requirements just completely change.

I think it's excellent in all of the ways that software can be. The only negative that I've got is the one that I said before which is half negative, half positive. That it's being developed so quickly.

The core applications are what our business uses day-to-day, including incident, change, problem, service catalogue and knowledge. However, I think the real value comes in when you start using CMDB, discovery, asset management and orchestration. Also, the fact that you can build custom apps and there are additional apps for HR, Facilities, etc. is also what makes this tool great.

It has given us a single source of record across all departments. Also, it has allowed us to automate many processes along with enforcing processes by making them workflow driven.

My only thought is while it is great they are expanding into many different areas of business, don’t forget about the core of this product and why it was originally built. UI and feature enhancements to records like incidents would be great.

I have been working with the release from June 2011 – Geneva.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With scalability, we have grown quite significantly in the last two years and the performance of our instance has really taken a hit. However, ServiceNow support has been great and we are currently in the process of moving to a new data center and on to faster hardware to improve this issue.

This can be very hit and miss, there are some individuals who are fantastic and a lot of help and then there are others that are not so much. My biggest struggle is with them just not reading my updates and asking the same questions just to put the ball back in your court even though it is likely you already provided them the information. I will say it has gotten a lot better over the years.

If you aren't very familiar with ServiceNow, I would recommend bringing in a vendor for deployment. They will help you understand the tool and make sure you aren’t boxing yourself in with the way things are built out. The OOB processes ServiceNow offers are all based on ITIL standards so theoretically there aren't a lot of customizations you should need to make up front.

I have worked for a company who used a vendor and did it themselves and now I do it for customers. My biggest piece of advice is don’t just try to make ServiceNow do what your old tool did. Take advantage of the power behind this tool!

This isn’t the cheapest solution out there, but is definitely worth it if implemented and used correctly.

I haven’t necessarily used or evaluated other systems, but I have done work with integrating to other solutions and converting users from other solutions to ServiceNow. I will say ServiceNow makes most of these tools like TrackIt or OmniTracker as a few examples look like they are about 20 years behind the game. The biggest struggle is trying to get users to look at ServiceNow and use the tool to really improve their processes instead of just trying to copy the process you used in their old system.

There are a ton of features and capabilities that can be used to automate processes within your organization and have a single source of data and this is an exceptional tool for that. There is always room for improvement and as they try to expand into different markets ,I do think some of the older applications get left behind and aren’t maintained as they should be.

ServiceNow is a great tool and I would highly recommend it. It will give you powerful automation capabilities and can significantly decrease time users have to spend researching and working tickets not matter what department it is.

As a technical specialist, the features that are most valuable to me are:

• Facility for doing customizations
• Very quick time to business
• Good support
• Availability time
• Some nice development tools
• Facilities for building integration

At the moment, we have implemented Incident, Problem, Change, Catalog and a bit of Asset Management. As we had a terrible system before ServiceNow, we did not have any kind of KPIs. Now we have all the processes integrated between each other and with some good KPIs.

The number of improvements is big, but we are still doing changes on the platform so we can get even more. At this point, we have already done almost 1000 stories (each story represents a change) with improvements.

They improved, a bit, the Reporting part of the product, but for sure it could be improved a lot more. I think they also should re-think the way they license the tool because it’s too expensive to automate all of your business, but you’ll need lots of licenses. If they did this, it would be an awesome tool. People go for doing some dirty integrations (with JIRA for example) just to reduce the number of licenses needed in ServiceNow.

I worked for a ServiceNow partner for some years before being a client. As a client, I have used the solution for one-and-a-half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I really like it. They answer quite fast and provide good solutions.

It was straightforward because we had a clear idea of what processes we were implementing and how they would be (Workflow). The complex part of it is basically map your processes; implementing the tool is the easy part.

At my current company, we did it with ServiceNow and in-house (me). But I worked at a ServiceNow Partner before, and I would strongly recommend a vendor implementation unless you already have some experts in-house.

We did an extensive evaluation to choose this product. It’s confidential and I cannot give details of it.

As a technical specialist, I can see that the product is really good and has lots of enhancements with each version. It’s a really good (but expensive) product. As it’s very easy to customize, it’s also easy to break it. I would recommend just to have a really good specialist (who knows some of the business as well) and it should be pretty straightforward to succeed.