Clarity SM Reviews

• Multitenancy does not require a standalone implementation per customer.
• Reporting and Dashboards are components which allow you to measure customer contracts.

• We can use the same installation for several and independent customers (multi-tenancy).
• ITIL processes.

I would like more flexibility on KPI and SLA definition.

I have used the product for 6+ years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a score of 6/10.

The high availability setup is more complex, but nothing special.

We evaluated ServiceNow.

It is a stable and good product, with several integrations and an interesting API.

• Incidents
• Request management
• Change management
• Asset management

These are the core processes for organization, as we are more focused on them.

When we started, we did not have a proper service catalog or services, and there were many complaints from end users regarding our services.

CA Service Desk Manager has helped us publish our service and provide better service to our users. That’s why our satisfaction rate has increased over the years.

Mobility is one area: There should be improvements in terms of implementations and content.

Also, they have launched Xinterface, which is very good, but it is restricted to only to incidents and requests. It should be used for changes, as well.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager for eight years.

We have not had any issues related to stability.

We have not had any issues related to scalability.

Pricing and licensing are affordable compared to other IT system management tools.

We evaluated BMC and HPE.

Make sure that you have your processes ready so that the implementation will be easier.

Some of the features that we really like about the solution is that certain parts of it are pretty expandable and customizable. The support that we get from CA has been pretty good. We haven't had major issues with them, and they're really responsive as well.

The tool itself is an enterprise tool. It fits our needs and we can actually expand it out to the further campus, instead of just having one area of focus or one group using it.

Honestly, we started off just using one part of the solution, just using request management, and then gradually, as they've improved the application, we've actually started to use it more and more. Now, we use it for our change management, our problem management. We started to use the mobile application and the unified self-service. We've started to expand as CA has focused more on their ITSM tool.

This solution has helped align our overall IT and organization strategy because it got rid of shadow systems. Before, because we're the central IT department, every area kind of had their own shadow system or some way of doing change management, or some way of doing request management, or incident management. Basically, we kind of unified all our processes to bring down the cost. Everybody's on the same page. Everybody knows what's going on. Our outages have dropped. Our communication between areas has increased. It's been a huge benefit for us.

Honestly, I would like to see them really change the UI for the user experience for the Service Management piece, or the Service Desk Manager piece, to match the unified self-service, so it looks more modern and more sleek.

It'd be nice if they actually improved the mobile scalability, so if somebody goes to that Service Desk Manager tool, it actually will go right to a mobile website instead of an old PDA-style website. Those are some of the bigger issues that we've been getting. The UI just looks really dated.

System architecture-wise, we changed our solution where, before, they had one type of server setup, which really had some stability issues, but we moved to their new advanced server setup and, so far, so good. We had really good luck with it. We've had some hiccups here and there, but nothing too major.

With the new architecture that we have, scalability is a lot easier. The system's more adaptable now. We could drop in more servers if we need to, pretty easily.

We've used their technical support quite a bit. Their technical support is good, depending on the tech that you get. There're some techs that, as soon as I see the tickets assigned to them, I'm kind of like, "I don't really want to deal with this person," but there's a bunch of them that are fantastic. They'll call you; they'll follow up with you.

I remember one time I was working with one of them, and we had upgraded and just installed a patch, and he walked us through the whole process. Their techs that are fantastic are fantastic, but they also have, you know, just like any organization I guess.

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.

We've been using the tool, the CA tool, for about almost 10 years now. When we initially set it up, it was pretty straightforward because we came from nothing. We didn't really have a service management tool.

We’ve had some hiccups with the upgrades themselves. There were some growing pains. I know they're trying to do a unified installer, and they're trying to make things easier, but they're still not there.

We had one vendor – this is a long time ago – called iET and it made it to the final round. Their issue was, they didn't support Firefox; all they supported was Internet Explorer. They kept on telling us, "Oh, it's on our roadmap, it's on our roadmap." We waited. We delayed for six months until their "roadmap" was supposed to come out. They never did Firefox, so it was pointless; why are we going to only use Internet Explorer?

We had Remedy. BMC Remedy was one of them. They were a little pricey. One of the departments that joined with us had a bad experience with them.

FrontRange was also evaluated. FrontRange was pretty small at that time. They weren't really this big player as they are right now.

Go in with an open mind. CA sometimes has a negative connotation just because it's a big company. Go in with an open mind and work with the sales person. Get one of their technical assets onboard so he can take a look and see what the system can do, because there's a lot more that it can do than what they actually try to sell you. Just go in with an open mind.

If I would have rated it a year or two ago, I would have rated it lower, because I felt like CA just totally gave up on ITSM service management portion. They kind of said, "Oh, well. You know, it's out there and that's it." Honestly, for the last year, they've been really doing a good job. I think they've become more agile. They've been doing a really good job of keeping things up to date, getting the customers more involved. They have a new customer form, where they allow you to vote on features and such.
They still have a way to go for them to catch up to other companies that are out there for their service management tools but I think they're in the right direction.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate many processes – like change management, incident management, problem management, CMDB, all of them – in the same tool.

The benefits that we are seeing from the service management is since you can integrate the products, you can make correlations of which changes cause incidents, or which configuration updates have changes or have many incidents over a certain period, and from that, gather more data to work with it.

From the implementation side, it's a tool that you can customize a lot. This customization sometimes, on upgrades and so on, it gives you a really hard time, so I would suggest trying to build a solution that you can operate with the customizations that the product allows you to do.

I would like to see a new UI, and stuff that will keep customizations going on so you don't have to do all of the reworking all over again to keep up with the next product version.

The stability just depends. In small shops, it's very stable, but once you go into big shops, such as banking infrastructure, that have many policies, sometimes there are some challenges there.

It gives the opportunity for growth. If you have more services and more users, you just keep growing and scaling the hardware and the software, and you still get the same response.

The initial setup just depends whether you have training or not. Usually, you just need the first training. After that, you can just follow up with the guidelines that CA has given to you and you can pretty much go through them.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like CA is just the recognition; the support provided for it. I want to have support from a company and CA just delivers that.

My rating is basically based mostly on the integration; to try out a new solution, and we chose service management; the process integration. How many solutions can give you that process integration together in just one tool? Most of the tools are just for tickets, incidents, or problems, but they don't give you the whole package together.

• SLA escalations: The SLA escalation feature is accurate and helps the service management team to manage the services delivered, as well as to monitor the performance of the analysts working on the tickets.
• Multitenancy: This feature allowed multiple logically separated entities to work on the same ticketing system. There was complete data isolation.
• Ease of editing code: The code behind the UI and the functionality is quite easy to edit and does not require much learning time.

Multitenancy has helped to use a single solution for multiple departments. This way, there was a single ticketing system for many departments, which saved a lot of cost and helped the departments with organizing their requests.

There are later versions available that we are not using yet. Many desired improvements have already been included in those versions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of ways they could improve the product:
- Better reporting: Data specifying which ticket spent how much time in which status should be easily available/stored somewhere.
- Readily available plugins: Plugins should be made available for integration with third-party tools that are commonly used (e.g., Nagios). Such integration needs to be developed externally. This improvement can make the tool really popular.

I have been using it for four years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

No issues with stability. This depends on the level of customization done.

Technical support is 8/10.

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.

Initial setup was straightforward.

One-time setup was done by a vendor team and later, other implementations were done in-house. The documentation is sufficient to help with the implementation and scalability should be kept in mind when implementing.

For organizations that are beyond the startup phase but are still not very huge, this is the ticketing system to choose.

The most valuable features of this product are security, scalability and the possibilities for customization.

We can’t compete with the price against small local vendors. Demanding customers are our market.

We have mainly made money by selling our consultant services around it.

Some the features that can be improved are:

• Usability: xFlow is a great step forward, but further steps are needed. Public bids in Finland often require HTML5 UI. xFlow fulfills that requirement.

• Public bids in Finland often do not permit browser plugins: Java or Adobe Flash Player. In such cases, we just have to offer other solutions since Visualizer requires Flash. Thus, there is a need to get rid of Flash.

• Internalization: Check out language plugin in ServiceNow. CA is quite far behind in this area.

I have used this solution since the year 2009.

Some bugs have been found during the years, but they have been resolved.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

It’s okay. We have had issues while getting fixes for a few older releases.

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.

ITSM deployment projects are always quite difficult.

CA is competitive, i.e., if there are a lot of end users compared to number of analysts. However, that is not always the case.

We considered both global and local vendors.

A customer comment after our sales presentation (CA Service Desk Manager + CA Control Minder): "We have finally found a vendor who is serious about security."

The most valuable features are the service catalog and process automation; in deployment, the ICT automation and self-service.

• Self-consumption of services by end-users
• Standardization
• Automation with increased effectiveness

I would like to see integration between the service management products and consolidated application of patches.

We have used this solution for five years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I encountered issues with scalability. The solution is 32-bit.

I would give technical support a rating of 9 out of 10.

The initial installation was simple. The initial configuration and integration between products was complex.

Make sure you have a strong official CA support presence.

With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes. From incident management to release management, CA SDM empowers and energizes ABS and their clients.

We are ITIL compliant and we have a lot of experience implementing IT services. We offer these facilities to our clients and customers. SDM has many automatic functions that allow us to offer value when implementing business rules in a short time and without code, just by configuring the tool.

We are an enterprise that sells IT services and all our areas involved in IT processes use the tool.

I think each tool suffers difficulties when a customer has requirements completely outside the standard, which is very common.

Technical support is good, once scaled to a second level. But usually, there are difficulties in the first approach.

CA develops and acquires enough tools and adds them to its solutions, but does not necessarily fully integrate them before releasing them. That also makes initial implementation difficult.

And finally, CA currently has problems delivering the tool in the cloud. CA tried to insert a new tool in the cloud but failed. Today, only MSPs can deliver the service, but not CA directly.

We have been using CA Service Desk Manager for 12 years.

In 12 years, we had only a pair of important isolated stability issues.

We have not really had any scalability issues. Rather, the companies are the ones that often do not have clear information about when they have to make the jump to a next level.

We have a lot of experience and do not have much need of manufacturer support. But, like most large companies, it is an area of opportunity.

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.

SDM comes preloaded and preconfigured. We have started a service desk in a week, but without a doubt, the difficulty comes from the customer environment; the volume, the processes to be assembled, their level of maturity, etc.

It is not the most expensive nor the cheapest solution. It depends on the negotiation with CA, but in general I think it is a fair price.

We evaluated BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.

I would recommend evaluating the tool with companies that have already implemented it. It is very important that you can find references that can be consulted.

You want to know about their time of experience in the market, whether they are certification tested with the manufacturer with an expert level, and are a reliable business partner for implementation.