Clarity SM Previous Solutions

it_user657792

Global Manager, CA Solutions at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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Ahmed Issawi

System Architect ITSM application at Michigan State University

When we first started, we really didn't have a solution. It was kind of easy just to say, "Hey!" We put out an RFP. We had about 15 vendors, and CA was obviously one of the larger ones. We had them come in and give us a demo, and they gave us more bang for the buck. We've been working with them ever since. As I’ve mentioned, with the upgrades, we've had hiccups, but they've been really easy going about sending technical assets if we needed technical assets.

The one thing I like about CA is, they're willing to work with you. Their service is huge. I really don't want to have somebody that's a stickler; that's going to be like, "Oh, well, this is what you got; this is all we can help you with." CA will sometimes, depending again on that technician, they'll go over and beyond, and help you out. Their sales folks are really good. We haven't had any problems with them. We reach out to them if we want a ticket escalated; they'll escalate it for us. They're pretty consistent on their communication with us, so it's really good.

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MakhosonkeMatshoba

ESM Specialist at LetsCloudIT

I have used ServiceNow and BMC Helix previously.

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it_user653550

Senior Computer Specialist at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Our organization has utilized CA ticketing solutions AHD, USD, SDM, and Service Desk since I’ve been here.

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it_user778992

Service Architect at SANDVIK IT Global Shared Services

We had our homegrown solution in Lotus Notes, but we knew that we should grow a lot, be more of a global IT. So we needed one central system that was more generic. What we used before was just a database, very, very simple.

We also picked Service Desk Manager because we saw there could be possibilities to add other products once again.

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reviewer977340

Project Manager at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

We are also using ServiceNow and our developers are using JIRA.

In my opinion, JIRA Service Desk is more oriented to developing software and it covers the topics surrounding that job.

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it_user677709

Sr. Director, IT Service Management at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Remedy was the previous solution at my current organization. It was not easy to support or migrate to new versions and was cost prohibitive.

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it_user348003

Senior Service Manager at State of Colorado

We had Service Desk, and then we went to the cloud version. We tried to do it as SaaS, but then moved it back in-house. We went to the cloud, but some of the other products we wanted to use from CA aren't hosted in the cloud, so to make it an environment to where it's all in one environment, we brought it back in-house. It was working OK in the cloud.

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Jeff Vielle

Regional IT Coordinator at Novus International

Our servers were upgraded and over time we were noticing that there might be some issues with it because the older system had a few bugs and it but support options were limited. It was decided that we should get a newer, upgraded system to make sure we had the support from CA. Even though they did help us a lot with our older system, they were limited in what they could do. They still helped out. And the new system, now we create tickets, now things are resolved quite well. So any little issues, whether it is tickets not going to a user's email, things like that, are resolved.

I think we are comfortable with CA. We had heard of other options. My colleagues and I have used other ticketing systems as well before, in previous jobs. CA just seems to work for us overall, so that's why we stuck with it.

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it_user778941

Ca System Admin at MGM Resorts International

We were a CA house, and then we outsourced to a company that brought Remedy in for the ticketing system. When we got rid of them, we needed to bring our own ticketing system back, and we brought CA back, we brought Service Desk back. We could have gone elsewhere, but we chose to bring it back into the environment.

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it_user660654

Development Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

We didn't have anything before this.

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it_user779055

Analytics Agile Methodology Manager with 5,001-10,000 employees

We were using Remedy previously. It was such a complex solution. It was very hard to maintain it. That was its main problem.

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Gurinder Giran

Senior Consultant

I am a consultant and we implement products for the tools. I only come into the picture once the product has already been sold. I am not part of that decision-making team.

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it_user558537

Head IT Operations at ICBC Argentina

We were using the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite solution for many years.

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it_user578808

Applications Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Previously, we used an older version of the CA product that was no longer officially supported.

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it_user558528

Senior Application Support Engineer at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our old solution was not meeting our needs. It was very hard to use. It was causing a lot of people issues, so we needed to find something new.

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it_user373104

Director of Technical Operation Services at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

First we adopted Idle in our company. The Idle framework. We needed a tool and we chose another company, It was FrontRange. The problem with FrontRange was it didn't have enough structure to it. When you're a young company implementing Idle, and you don't have the right structure in your tracking system, you can go off in fifty million directions and we did. We recognize that, we were having problems reporting. We were having problems telling ourselves how we were doing in delivering our service.

The tool had flexibility, but it gave far too much flexibility for what we needed, so we started to look again. Then, we met with CA, we talked to them about Service Desk and we started to understand what the structure was that CA Service Desk was going to bring to us. Yet give us the flexibility that we need, which is important, but it's not too flexible, it kept you sort of boxed in, and that's not a bad thing when you're doing adopting Idle. Therefore, when we measured CA Service Desk versus the other companies that we looking at and what we already had, we found that it was going to be the best solution.

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Makhosonke-Matshoba

ESM Specialist at Gijima

In my company, we have both CASDM and BMC Helix ITSM, and I have worked with both of them. I find the BMC solution easier to deploy than CASDM. Some of my colleagues regularly support BMC and it seems that their deployment is much quicker.

Our BMC solution is much smaller and it does not cover all of the areas, especially in the systems management space, the AIOps, reporting, and aggregation. BMC does have this functionality but we didn't acquire everything. I expect that eventually, all of our clients will be using CASDM.

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it_user468141

Senior System Engineer at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

I did not previously use a different solution. We have been using this product from the beginning. It was chosen because of the features available at the given cost.

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it_user354894

Director, Development Teams at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Right now we actually have a contract with them for Service Desk support. They're the ones that are bringing in people to get support to the Service Desk.

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it_user351345

MS Director at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We chose CA because we had previously used CA Spectrum.

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it_user502809

Incident Manager at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’ve used SCSM (System Center Service Manager), quite a good product from Microsoft. The difference is in scalability; there was a need to use a web application compared to an in-house product solution.

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it_user467319

Technical Team Manager at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We also looked at BMC Remedy and GWI.

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it_user355599

Director of IS Portfolio Management at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We came from HP, and it was well past end-of-life to the point where we were pretty much holding our breath on a daily basis as to whether it would stay up all day or not. So we waited, probably, well past the useful life of the HP system, and that's what prompted us to start looking at not only a service desk solution, but we also wanted a more robust solution.

The CA suite has a larger availability of th ose modules that we could work together to get the whole package. We are using monitoring a bit, so we use UIM, and we just went live with SDM. And we, of course, use Service Desk. So the expectation is to implement as much of the suite as we possibly can in a step-wise fashion.

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Tomasz Szczesny

IT Administrator / Help Desk Platform at Inter Cars SA

We have experience with Jira and have decided to move over to Jira in the coming months.

About 15 years ago, I also worked with an HP product called HP Service Desk. At the time, CA was more flexible and we could create customizations ourselves. On HP this was not possible without external support.

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it_user347988

Senior Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're using Service Desk as our request management system, but we'll be moving away from it to Catalog.

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Reviewer2892

Vice President of Infrastructure Management at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

We have been using this product for eight years and nobody remembers the reason for the switch, however we are going to switch this product due to lack of technical support and legacy structure for the version which we were using.

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it_user493200

Pre-Sales/System Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I previously used other solutions, but they were not as powerful. I'm working as a single MSP and work with different solutions.

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it_user579465

Data Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I have used a different solution before, but it wasn’t what my clients really needed. The other systems don't have a variety of services that CA SDM has included under only one system. If CA SDM doesn't have a particular feature, then CA has facility integration with its other systems.

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it_user657765

Sr. Team Lead, Perioperative Services at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

This is the first tool of its type that is being used in the way that we are using it.

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it_user778644

IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I wasn't there when they made that decision. When I got there they had already implemented it, but I think they didn't have a real viable ITSM tool for effecting problem change and incident management, so they needed a tool to do that.

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Lucas Mesquita

Information Technology Analyst at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

We were using an intranet website, initially. It was very rudimentary and we couldn’t customize it without relying on outsourcing. We switched over to CA Service Desk Manager.

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it_user579465

Data Administrator at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I have used a different solution before but it wasn’t what my clients really needed; thus I moved over to this product.

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it_user481026

CTO at a tech company with 51-200 employees

We have never worked with another product.

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it_user489930

Senior Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Apart from the user perspective, I have no experience in the design and implementation of alternative products beyond the basic installation.

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it_user373089

Chief Customer Officer at a government with 501-1,000 employees

I think that we did use some other vendors to help us implement some of the solution, and some of those groups were not as strong as we might have wanted, but I think everything from CA's perspective has been pretty strong. The one element that we've wanted to see improved and we've really worked with them on is the user interface is what I like to call a little conky and so we are consistently working with them and the product marketing people to make it better.

Mostly it was a financial forecast, looking at how much it was costing us to do that. Also we're working in Colorado to setup our own cloud serves and maybe that we offer to the counties and to other state or other cities inside Colorado. It was just time to put that into our data center and a little bit more in our control, but really it was a cost scenario where it saved us money to convert those licences and better idea for 2 or 3 years and then we can look at where we could be in the future. Maybe the cloud providers were not as advanced we might have wanted at the time.

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Marcos L. Domingos

ITSM Specialist at Qintess

We did use another solution previously but there was a need for evolution.

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it_user778689

Enterprise Application Administer

Usually, we look for a new solution because most of the group does not like a product, and they go after a different product. It is not usually something we look at as a corporate standpoint, because we are a state entity. There are always those that can get involved and say, "Hey, we want to make a change." It is not always just us that say, "Hey, let's go and do it."

Right now, the CA Service Desk Manager is a set standard for the university. All three campuses are using it, but there are some other help desks out there that are smaller help desks. Local help desks that are using other tools. Smaller tools. So, it is not like they have to use it from a corporate standpoint, but it is available to them if they want it.

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it_user654489

Director of Applications and Business Intelligence at a government with 10,001+ employees

We used Remedy and switched to CA Service Desk for cost and ease of implementation.

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it_user508716

IT Service Management Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

I have used many different solutions. My role is a consultant that helps design and enhance service management solutions. The customers mainly switch as they adopt the ITIL framework and move away from non-ITIL products that cannot be (easily) modified/adapted to fit the new IT operations strategic model.

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it_user577890

Project Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We had tried a local competing solution in the years 2014-2015. Their UI is much more suitable for sales presentations. However, they have too many issues with stability and their technical support is at a very poor level.

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it_user373311

CA Administrator at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were on a very old version of Remedy, lots of issues. Moving to CA was a pretty easy choice, cost and everything came into play. CA was definitely the right choice for us.

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it_user105252

CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

No prior solution existed. The main reason for the choice of this solution was because Microsoft System Center did not adequately present its support for Linux and thus management perceived there to be no support. View full review »

it_user778506

Assistant Programmer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

No, we had an earlier release of Service Desk Manager.

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Marcos L. Domingos

ITSM Specialist at Qintess

No.

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Marcos L. Domingos

ITSM Specialist at Qintess

We did not use a different solution previously. We just upgraded.

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it_user653556

IT Operations and Services at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We didn’t have a previous solution.

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it_user778839

Systems Enginee

My company has been using CA for a long time.

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it_user575832

Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We used in-house solutions and it did not give us the coverage over all the ITIL processes to provide professional service/support.

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it_user660669

Analyst at a tech services company

We didn’t have anything before this.

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it_user585885

Director de Servicios at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

We looked at open-source solutions and other branches like IBM or Remedy. SDM, at the time, offered critical differentiators that made us change and stay until now.

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it_user558381

IT Executive - Application Development at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had a request to scan the market. CA was the best product at that time. They needed to make sure that our service catalog was communicated regularly within our business, so that everybody is briefed on what is new and how CA has evolved.

We needed a product that would integrate with our architecture. This is important, because we were looking for a specific piece, and it fit the puzzle nicely. There were certain features we were also looking for; a set of business requirements that we had to fulfill. That was basically our criteria.

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it_user778683

Systems Analyst

We did not have a previous solution. We did not have a help desk at all.

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it_user525810

Lead ,Managed Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It was the same CA solution. The customer started with CA Service Desk 11.2 and they have upgraded to 12.6, 12.9 and 14.1.

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Marcos L. Domingos

ITSM Specialist at Qintess

We did not previously use a different solution.