CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. IFS Assyst

It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)

Incentivized

Axios assyst is for organisations that want to improve and automate processes.

• This application is very easy to use. It is the best when it comes to training since the application is easy to understand and employees are able to easily catch up on work process.
• It is a great reporting tool because users can look up work they've done over a period of time.
• The auto populate feature is very helpful since at the service desk users do have several tickets to create for a single requester.

Incentivized

• It was a low cost solution
• The service catalog is an ITIL compatible format

Incentivized

• Linking into other ITSM Tools for automatic event/alert generation could be a good feature to use. Not sure if this has been addressed in later versions of the product.
• Effective integration into communication tools such as pagers, text messages would be a great plus. Again this may have been addressed in later versions.

• Like many other ITSM tools, built-in reports are limited; third party reporting tool such as Microsoft SQL need to be used.
• Axios service desk does not offer much help, our internal technical people know more than their support analysts.

While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.

Incentivized

At this point, we are stuck with it. We can't afford a change at this point.

Incentivized

We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.

Incentivized

We thought SDE was bad, we were looking for an alternative. Assyst is worse. We thought ServiceNow was too expensive. We were wrong. RightAnswers is a reaaly good tool but only for KM.

Incentivized

• Because of the difficulty in creating various functions and workflows, it has had a negative impact over time to where the 'knee-jerk' reaction to any new options requested or desired is to customize it which has resulted in mimicking out of box functions through the customizations.
• Examples of the use of certain areas and options is lacking. This has resulted in the misuse of various fields. For example: Multi-tenancy we do not have turned on and was never pursued because we we're told it "wouldn't work for us". This has resulted in previous administrators creating many new roles (which in turn has created just as many access types and data partitions) which has created a large amount of overhead. It's now difficult to turn on multi-tenancy until this overhead can be reconstructed/removed and the bringing personnel up to speed on the changes.
• On the initial install (which I wasn't with the company at that time) CA had provided us with custom scripts to execute certain functions (without considering if Service Desk could actually do that function out of box) and applied it. After a few upgrades to the product, these scripts are still being used and have caused underlying issues since their application. CA has denied support on these scripts because they are customizations even though we are looking to remove them.

Incentivized

• Replacement of 3 systems with Axios assyst
• Integration with other enterprise systems