They had an old software suite called Vantive that was going out of support and starting to get too expensive. They needed to move to a more modern platform.

We own a number of other HP products that are related to Service Manager, I was brought on to deploy this package.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

We were using Remedy, and it wasn't robust enough in our opinion. We wanted an integrated system not only for incident management but also for change management and testing. Remedy didn't provide that at the time, and Micro Focus did.

No previous solution was used.

We started 13 years ago with the original HPE Service Desk. Now, it's not an original HPE solution; HPE took over Peregrine Systems. So that’s what we use, for better or worse. But, it's quite customizable.

It's not like we just choose a solution. We follow the HPE roadmap. Whatever they deliver, we end up with it and implement it. There are times when we keep asking for some advanced features and it's a matter of time waiting for new releases. They are not that very agile incorporating the changes. They take a long time.

I didn't have a decision in that. That was made by the change management organization. They wanted to switch. They wanted something that could be interfaced with mobile phones that could send the approval notifications to the mobile phones or so the IM tickets could be sent to the mobile phones. I get them on my phone now. So that I can respond to those is it's an emergency and I can take care of them right away and I don't have to wait till I get back to the office or to a PC. I think that had a large interface in why they bought the product.

Prior to SM 9.3.3, we had various iterations of SC (most recently 6.2.7) for approximately 10 years. Before that, we had a series of internal processes in place.

I previously used Remedy.

We bought every product HP offered back in 2007 when the Intel craze was sweeping the IT industry. We were running BMC Magic Solution before.

Only our sales manager had used a different solution earlier. From our perspective, we always see other tools that compete with HP Service Manager; we never fail with price.

We also use ServiceNow and Service Manager, but they occupy different lanes in the company. One is the classic IT service management and the other is for managing non-IT services.

As I mentioned, we were using another HP product (at that time, it was not yet HPE). It was HP OpenView Service Desk. That was their previous service management suite. When HP acquired Peregrine, with Service Center that became Service Manager, actually, they phased out Service Desk. We moved from Service Desk to Service Manager simply because of an HP – at the time, HP – decision.

We were using lots of different solutions. We were using an old, heavily customized BMC Remedy workflow-based tool, which we were quite happy with at the time. But our company was acquired by our parent company and there were other tools that were in use by that company. Plus there were other companies that were acquired. Through acquisition you end up with an array of products that are in the same space, so what we did when we put HPE Service Manager in place, is we consolidated all of our tool sets into one, and we picked HPE. We didn't have one, most important criteria to satisfy. I think we had a lot of criteria.

InterTelecom was a consultation project. They were using Service Manager with three different incidents. We consolidated and put everything into one incident and implemented some new features.

We used HP OpenView 4.5; we switched to Service Manager as OpenView was relatively old anyway. HPE Service Manager was the natural successor so we went with it.

Previously, we were using Siebel HelpDesk. It was not suitable for our purposes. We needed something that was ITIL based; so HPE Service Manager fit what we wanted. It is easy to use, cost effective, and ITIL based.

In general, we are using multiple tools from HPE. Compliance and compatibility between those tools is better if you use the same vendor.

From my point of view, the most important criterion in picking a vendor is the quality of the support. We are in a position of the customer. We have the premium support for cases when something is not functioning and we cannot make it work.

It was, I think, a CA solution. SoftDirect, I think; there were several. It was a company decision to switch but I wasn't at the company at the time.

We previously used a very old version Solarwind, which could only detect CPU & memory. The main purpose for the upgrade project, was due to a broadcast storm occuring with my previous customer.

I know that that at our site, almost every two years we go to events like Gartners to ask for additional advice. Choosing a vendor actually comes down to the ability to integrate and scale and be enterprise level. There are a lot of small tools. They are good at some point features, but when it comes to the global picture, then you need to have quite a lot. For instance, to contain the rights. We are not there yet.

Service Center ran out of support, so we had to switch.

Nope, I'm all HPSM.

No, I have been using HP ITSM solutions now for 13 years.