I have consulted with many systems (Remedy, HEAT, Service Center, Tivoli, ServiceNow, Assyst, etc.). Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

We had one vendor – this is a long time ago – called iET and it made it to the final round. Their issue was, they didn't support Firefox; all they supported was Internet Explorer. They kept on telling us, "Oh, it's on our roadmap, it's on our roadmap." We waited. We delayed for six months until their "roadmap" was supposed to come out. They never did Firefox, so it was pointless; why are we going to only use Internet Explorer?

We had Remedy. BMC Remedy was one of them. They were a little pricey. One of the departments that joined with us had a bad experience with them.

FrontRange was also evaluated. FrontRange was pretty small at that time. They weren't really this big player as they are right now.

The solution was already selected.

We evaluated ServiceNow. It costs a fortune and required too much management.

We had Service Desk. When we consolidated the IT departments from all the agencies into OIT, Office of Information Technology, some of them had Remedy, some of them had Heat, some of them had Excel spreadsheet that they were capturing all the stuff on. Since we already had Service Desk in the cloud, and we already had been trained on it, it was more just, "Go ahead and move to that," instead of really trying to move everybody off onto something else.

We didn't. Because we had been a CA Service Desk house before, we brought it back in.

I can’t comment.

Although we are also running BMC Remedy and still have some clients hosted on it, I don't have much insight into it. I'm told that the latest version is run on a cloud platform, just like the CA SDM. I believe the BMC deployment is very quick, much quicker than the CA SDM deployment. That's a plus from a deployment point of view. In terms of functionality, it looks like the functionality is pretty much the same across the two products.

We work with a lot of vendors, but they did not have this product.

Compared to some of the other products, I think we are bit behind.

We looked at IBM and BMC solutions.

Personally, we did not evaluate any other solutions. We were upgrading an existing product.

I don’t think we looked at other vendors before choosing CA.

Actually, no there weren't any other options. When we went through the list, when we were doing all of our due diligence, we measured five other companies against CA and then against what we had with FrontRange and we made the decision that it wasn't even worth the effort of really sitting down and talking negotiations with the other companies.

I give it a 10/10. It's because of the impact that it's had on our business. It now tells us how we should do our work. It now tells us how we can staff. It tells us how we're doing, and it's reliable. That in itself, that's the reason why. If you're truly an adopter of Idle, the reason I would tell you to choose Service Desk is because of the structure that it comes with, and the out of box features that it gives you. Which makes the job easy for implementing Service Desk, because we migrated from FrontRange over to Service Desk.

We've looked at quite a few, including ServiceNow and Microsoft Systems Center Service Management. They have a whole suite similar to CA. Citrix as well.

I was not part of the selection process. I know that HP was one of the vendors. I don't recall if IBM was in there as well. We previously had BMC.

Yes, we have evaluated more products like IBM, Landesk, Microsoft, and Manage Engine.

We previously used a system that wasn't scalable to use globally, which is why we switched.

We did. We did an analysis that came down to two different vendors, CA and another, and we ended up going with CA for a couple of reasons. We have several people in the organization who had experience with CA. Also, we felt there was less risk because CA was established in the market.

Not applicable.

ServiceNow we also looked at. I would have been okay either way. In all honesty, it was more of a cloud solution and we wouldn't have needed our system administrators for as much as the upgrade work. That was kind of one of our driving things that did lean us towards that. The other tools were way too expensive compared to what we had. When we did the comparison, again, the new tools looked tiny and new, but we weren't utilizing what we have. We have some of the same features. We just haven't used them.

I can help you to check and evaluate options; compare the solutions. Therefore, the first step is: Compare the same thing with the same thing, apples to apples, but I cannot tell you which is the better choice of fruit.

I think we're probably looking to move to another solution.

The company has invested in ServiceNow for the facilities side of the business, so they're already using that on to manage facilities, ticketing and the like. And ServiceNow is probably the leader in the industry when it come to this ITSM tool.

We had evaluated and looked at the second product in the market.

We have never worked with another product.

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.

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

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.

This was an easy choice fifteen years ago.

As a technical consultant, I'm usually brought in after tool selection is decided on.

We considered both global and local vendors.

It’s the integration between all the different tools we currently use. Really ServiceNow was the only other. There was a lot of things that CA could do over ServiceNow that we liked. 

There is always a challenge with the cloud solutions, such as ServiceNow. But the level of customization that we can do with the tool is normally not possible with the other tools in the market. The UI should be more intuitive.

We also evaluated ServiceNow to reduce infrastructure costs, but some CA Service Desk Manager features do not exist in ServiceNow, even though it is a more expensive solution.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We were already satisfied with the benefits of the previous version of this product.

I didn’t evaluate any other products. I worked for CA at the time when I first started using this product.

Yes, but we decided to stick with CA because of our partnership and knowledge of the product.

We looked into other vendors too, such as Cherwell. But this is already 7 years ago. Since then, we observe the market and review our decision every two years to make sure that our decision is still right.

We did’t look at alternatives.

We evaluated BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.

In my work, we only use CA products.

There were other suppliers that we also looked at and compared. We looked at the Asian companies.

We looked at ManageEngine, Semantic, and a couple other companies.

We chose CA because of flexibility, working with them and another company, and the support. Support was a big thing about choosing CA.

The customer looked at ManageEngine, HPE Service Manager and others.

We evaluated BMC and HPE.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

I don't know as I wasn't involved in the decision process.

I wasn’t here in this period, but I know they evaluated BMC and HP.

We evaluated ServiceNow.