They had looked at a couple of other ones: BMC's Remedy, HPE Service Manager and then a third one. Remedy actually came in first in their reviews, they liked Remedy better but the license and support was more expensive.

Service Manager's big competitor is ServiceNow. It's a hosted solution in competition with HPE Service Anywhere. HPE has a hosted solution. People think ServiceNow is the be all end all. The reason they think that is simply because the user interface is really pretty. They think because the user interface is really pretty, the underlying stuff is working as well.

A couple years ago we looked at moving away from Service Manager into ServiceNow. The more we dug into ServiceNow the less we liked ServiceNow. While the UI is pretty, all the things that they swear are better, when we were testing it out and actually walked through some actual real life scenarios, didn't gain us anything. It was slower than what we were doing in HP Service Manager. They were like it's upgrade proof and you don't have to worry about any of your code breaking. We had code breaking. They are like, the upgrades are simple and experiences no outage. We experienced outage every time they did an upgrade. The hosted solution where someone else is taking care of it for you didn't really work.

We kept it in-house and we kept Service Manager because we wanted to be able to have that control. We wanted to know what the impact was going to be. We wanted to have our hands on because then if anything went wrong it's on-us. Because of that we have made sure everything's gone smoothly because it's on-us. As people are looking at their solutions as your looking at Service Manager compared to ServiceNow look at what you can configure and customize in HPSM compared to what you can do in ServiceNow. Look at the true cost of ServiceNow compared to their sales pitch of that costs. Look at what you can actually do with the tool set verses what they'll sell you with the tool set. Remember that the prettiness of the UI, it can look like a beautiful car but if it doesn't get you down the street it's not really a good car. It will look good in the driveway but it's lousy to drive.

Their fallback was this, and it wasn't like, "Oh, we didn't want HPSM." They analyzed three and this was number two. BMC and HPE Service Manager tend to flip back and forth between who's the best depending on what year. It wasn't like, "Oh, I guess we'll have to have Service Manager." It was, "Okay, that was more expensive then we want to pay. We're happy to go with HPSM."

Micro Focus Service Manager is a good platform, but ServiceNow is better because it's more flexible and easier, and it provides a lot of features and functions out of the box, ready to use.

Before we did our renewal agreement last year, we did a lot of comparison shopping with other solutions and looked at prices. We are very happy with Micro Focus Service Manager. In fact, other professional solutions cost two or three times for the same license.

We also looked at CA, IBM, and Service Now. At the time, I felt HP was the stronger product. I felt that they were investing heavily in the product's future capabilities.

We looked into some competitors, including ServiceNow. One branch of our company bought ServiceNow. We are in an internal competition.

We chose HPE because it's a large company. We are also a business with other lines of business. It was very helpful to know that it was not only useful for that one project.

HPE also has a cloud-based solution called Service Anywhere, but we are not sure how it works. Is the functionality the same and just the platform changed, or is the functionality different in the cloud-based solution? They are also looking at the road map for Remedy. But we would rather they improve HPE Service Manager.

Yes. Starting with industry evaluations such as Gartner, we shortlisted three vendors (HP, BMC & SNOW), who came in with proposals around product, pricing, deployment, etc. HP won out based on a combination of factors.

Compared to BMC, Micro Focus Service Manager is coming out a little cheaper.

We looked at Service Now two years ago. We stayed with HPE over Service Now because we have a suite of HPE products. We think it's easier to make the integrations into one.

We heard some other customers in Denmark have the back end as Service Manager and the front end as Service Now, as a portal to Service Manager. I don't know if it's easier to deploy in Service Manager, so I don't know. But I know some Danish companies have done it.

BMC and CA. We chose HP because their functionality seemed to be fairly better, their product offering seemed to touch every area of our company’s needs, and we wanted to integrate it completely into our business.

We are using ServiceNow for some facility management. It was easier to have a user-friendly interface from the beginning, but now when we use the service portal, it's catching up. It's close to the same usability as Service Now. As it stands, it's better than mediocre.

There wasn’t really a shortlist of vendors because, again, HP came to us proactively, announced the fact that Service Desk will be phased out, and indicated that all our licences, all the features, and even more would be available to us at no cost; that is, except the implementation cost, but we did that in house, so it was kind of an indirect cost. There was no cost in terms of new licences or professional services.

In general, when we’re looking at a vendor like HPE, Dell or IBM, the main criteria is integration. We’re using a lot of HPE products, and because we're using a lot of their products, we expect that we won't have to manage product A talking to product B and to product C. That is their stuff, and they need to manage that for us.

We did a large RFP bake-off between multiple vendors for large integrated suites doing processes, automation, and monitoring. We selected HPE due to the breadth of their tools, particularly in the monitoring and automation spaces. Service Manager was one of 49 products we purchased at the same time. It wasn't targeted explicitly for itself. It was more because of the breadth of tools from a single vendor.

We evaluated BMC.

Before choosing HPE Service Manager, we were BMC Remedy customers. We were quite happy with that. Remedy would have been on our short list.

We do not use HPE Service Manager ourselves. We implement it for our customers and they use various other vendors, such as CA IT Service Management.

There are a number of things to consider. One, you want to know that the reliability is. You need to know the software is going to do the job that you want it to do. You need to know that it's going to be fairly easy, painless to set up.

But at the same time, if you have any issues, you've got a good customer focus. That they're interested in making sure that they're going to basically get the best for the customer. So it's not just about - "we've sold you a load of products, so we'll respond to you now."

We didn't look at any other options as we wanted to continue with HPE and on-premise software, so we still had control.

I was not in the company when the decision was made to choose HPE Service Manager. We have a management committee that makes those decisions.

I wasn't at the time, but I think they were further considering the SoftDirect that they had. They had HPE and also another provider. There were three in the running.

I know there are competitors out there that have a little more flexibility and a little more ease of implementation. For what we use it for, it's good.

We're currently looking at the Big 4 vendors: ServiceNow, BMC, IBM, and HP. As we're already an HP customer, HP has a clear advantage.

We looked at ServiceNow and BMC. The reason we chose this tool was because we could not be on SaaS due to security issues. We were already using an HPE solution so it was easier for us to stay consistent.

Another reason was that ServiceNow is SaaS based and Service Manager is not.

We also looked at Service Anywhere but we could not go into a SaaS solution.
Maybe in the future, our next step would be to move to Service Anywhere within HPE.

No, I didn't evaluate other options.