CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB

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

Great for its responsiveness to customer service. Excellent with data replication. Impressive with workflow management. Great with the discovery of new network points.

Incentivized

• 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

• Management and organization of Configuration Items
• Ensures a single and uniform source of database to avoid any ambiguity between departments.
• Proper delivery of services

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.

• When getting started the Cloud deployment may be not that easy.
• To manipulate the system deeply requires a professional operator.
• Working on large data project.

Incentivized

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

Old versions which do not support CMS have a luck of user experience and performance for reports and service modeling.

Incentivized

Some complex issues regarding performance and platform upgrades have been difficult to address and have short time solutions.

Incentivized

Upgrades from old versions were really hard to handle.

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

Microfocus is less expensive than IBM. Also, IBM's user interface is more complex than Microfocus's User interface as Microfocus is more friendly. Also, Microfocus allows the user or system engineer to navigate the UI, search records and service manager, etc. providing the user complete management platform making it a completely accessible platform.

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

• Improved our infrastructure operations supporting well our business.
• Improved the lifecycle management of infra and software components.
• Timely identification of obsolescence and helps maintaining an up-to-date IT landscape supporting well our business operations.

Incentivized