ServiceNow Reviews

We primarily use this for our North America practice of IT Asset Management and IT Service Management (incident, problem, change, and knowledge). We also use it for HR Case Management and are now developing business applications in order to perform things like IP and Application Management.

I like the ease of use of the ServiceNow platform. 

We have used ServiceNow for HR case management, IT Asset Management, IT Service Management, and custom business applications

The value of features has changed with each release. Initially I was impressed with the automation capability. Now, the look and feel is a valuable benefit for adoption. The most recent addition of SAM Premium is a game changer for many organizations.

I would like to see Advanced Intelligent Automation. I can't wait to see how ServiceNow continues to build out the automation capability with things like RPA, OCR, and even machine learning capabilities to help make giant steps forward in the ITSM space.

The workflow capability for easy setup is powerful. Combine this with automation and you have a great tool which is built on ITSM principles.

As a platform approach I would say I really like this vision of saying ServiceNow is an application platform now as a service where we can build any application we want to so we have some applications on the baseline like in sales management, like change management, now customer services, like security operation. If we need to build other applications we can do it, the same way if we want to modify an application, we can do it as long as we follow the base practices.

It's something really nice to do with ServiceNow because all legacy products when you were trying to do something a little bit on the side, it didn't work anymore and was very out of grade. Here, with our customers it's actually nice to upgrade ServiceNow.

It's like when you work on science, you say, when I answer one question, I have 10 other questions rising up. I see the same thing with ServiceNow. When something is added on ServiceNow on the platform, then you have 10 more things to do because you have to improve again and again and again. Here what could we do? They probably have a lot of things to do with IOT. We can always improve a lot of things about how we work between citizen developers and professional developers.

I am a professional developer so I know about Javascript, about coding, about scripting, technical stuff, but need as well to have people who don't anything about it would just and test it by their business side of the things. I want to engage them more and more to do things, to start doing things and when they are stuck with something, they just say, "Okay, David, please come to us, please help us with this thing. Please finish up the polish part," and then we arrive. Those are the things I would like to improve to engage more and more and more the citizen developers.

I started using it in December 2011.

I think we've got one customer who had an outage once, or maybe twice. One was a mistake we did on an integration and not the fault of ServiceNow. Second one is that the personnel forgot to change some certificates, so the instance was working perfectly, but the customer said, "I have an outage here and why?" We looked at it and we say, "Did you do your work here?" "Oh shit! I have to do it now." Yeah, extremely nice. I never had any issue with ServiceNow.

We go through the smallest customers, probably have something like 30 people and the biggest ones probably have thousands of people using ServiceNow everyday.

It's working very nicely, with scalability. Again, scalability with number of people, but also different teams working on ServiceNow, different processes, different countries. You can work with people all over the world together because ServiceNow won't stop working at 9:00 in the evening for European time.

Extremely good. The latest incident I have registered on high support was last week and maybe it was extremely complex, extremely technical, but after maybe one hour or two hours they came back with an answer saying, "Yeah, David, please read the documentation because it explains there that what you're trying to do is not actually possible." They provides all the answers and explanation why it's not really good to do it.

It's different for each company because if you are already quite mature with your processes, if you have good communication on your team, if you are obvious approach of collaborating between people, it's extremely easy. It can take just weeks to do it. On the other side, if you had legacy processes, you customized the previous tools and if you don't have this collaboration approach with the different teams and if everyone says, "I know what I need. I need this and only this feature and I can't listen to you if you tell me otherwise."

In that case, it might take more time, not because of ServiceNow but because we need a chance to culture the company. We need to have a culture shift on the company to be able to go to the right direction on ServiceNow. Communication, marketing, intel or involvement, engagement with people. That's extremely important to do.

If you need more time to do, for example, user acceptance testing, if you say, "Well I'm not secure as a customer to go live now." "Okay, let's take one more week, two more weeks to test. We probably won't do anything, any new developments, just a sync," but at least you will be sure that your users know ServiceNow, they are ready for go live and will be smooth. That's the most important. You go live when it's smooth, and not when it will be hectic.

I have customers who use HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy or CA. Personally, I tried in 2011, I have tried to work on BMC Remedy for maybe two months. I didn't learn that much. When I had the opportunity to go on ServiceNow, I said, "Yes, let's try." It was very nice and I have also spent maybe two days on HP Service Manager and that was the two most boring days of my life.

Yeah, the only thing we have to say with customers who already have some product today, especially in ITSM, is don't implement what you have from BMC or HP in ServiceNow. When you do ServiceNow, you do the ServiceNow way, not the BMC or not the HP way. That's extremely important because that's where you can end up with something extremely complex, not only for the platform. The platform can manage it, the platform don't care. Technically it's possible. For the people, for the users, for the end users for the fulfillers, you want to do something simple.

For example, for one customer, a small customer like one Android people IT guys, small customer. They had on instant management they had three Android categories. When you do some ServiceNow implementations, the first implementation step, you have to review your processes and review the requirements. Be sure you have the right things in place and not the things you don't need. Yeah. I think if I have say three words about a good ServiceNow implementation, it's all about upgradabiity, because you have to upgrade every six months or every year so you need to think about the upgradability of your platform. You have to think about the performance and you have to think about the value.

If you request anything and if you are a customer and you ask me anything to me, I will tell you what is the justification. If you don't have any justification, I will tell you, "Well, I'm sorry. I can't do it." I'll go to the CS person, and the they will say, I want this feature and I will say, "Okay. You are the customer, I do whatever you need, but above that, you need a justification." That's extremely important.

I implement ServiceNow for our customers. I'm a reseller and we are partners of ServiceNow. I'm the company business developer.

From my point of view, it's the best solution in the market. It's so easy to implement, the ratio of days to implement is the lowest in the market; I can respond to all the needs of my clients. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the best solution.

The price is a huge barrier in the Portugese market when it comes to implementing ServiceNow.

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

Technical support is the best because they respond quickly. They have good SLAs to respond to our tickets with the correct priorities, it's very well defined. Compared with other suppliers, it's fantastic.

The initial setup is very easy. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the easiest solution to implement.

Licensing costs are the highest in the market. It's difficult to sell in Portugal, but for the rest of Europe, it's easy to sell because we can easily justify the value that the customer will gain from the product.

It's important to understand all the components of the solution. After that, with the base knowledge, it's easy to implement. It also helps to have some knowledge about processes based on the ITIL and ISO 20000. It's most important to become familiar with that to implement the solution.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for tickets and we use it for order processing.

We use the product for incident management, asset management, and service management. Those are the three big use cases. It's mostly asset management.

We use a ton of the features.

The best feature for me, personally, is Discovery. That one is super useful for us. Discovery is super advantageous. That has brought us a long way forward. That is a big deal for us. It's gotten us away from the manual of walking the floor to trying to find the assets.

The other one that is really big for us is Automatic Workflows. That is a big deal and certainly helps with the streamlining of the process and the interconnectivity with incident management.

The solution is very stable.

The company went out of their way to help us and even helped us save about six months of deployment time.

If you stick to the out-of-the-box solution, it's an easy setup.

You can scale the solution quite well.

Technical support is very helpful and very responsive.

The licensing needs to be divided into tiers in order to attract lower-level users.

Right now, the licensing is kind of an all or nothing and so what happens is, is that either somebody has full access or they don't have any access due to the way the licensing works. There is this kind of view for ITIL purposes access that we kind of need, and we don't have access to it. If you think of RACI, it's informed access. You would need a full license to be able to do it. And we just don't. It really caused us a level of visibility loss. 

Basically, what the licensing offers now is just for doers. There's no viewer role. It really needs a viewer role or an approver role level of licensing without a doer role license having to be issued.

If you move away from the out-of-the-box configurations, the initial implementation can get complex and take a while.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point.

I love the stability. We were lucky enough to be physically located very close to Service Now. When we were hitting problems with our internal organization to roadblocks, we literally drove up to Service Now headquarters and sat down with them for an eight-hour session to revamp our whole internal process. I was pretty sure that if we would have continued down our own process, we would have taken another six months. However, with Service Now's assistance, we fixed it in one day just by having access directly to Service Now. That was an amazing process. They enabled us to jump forward six months and made things super stable.

We're a huge company. Scalability is definitely possible. We're scaling to over 100,000 users. We have asset management users, incident managements, software deployment, hardware deployments, break fixes, asset monitoring, et cetera, all on this solution. 

We do plan to increase usage in the future.

If a company needs to scale, it can do so, no problem.

Technical support has been great. They are extremely helpful and responsive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service we receive as an organization.

We did previously use different solutions. Everything was fragmented. We were able to combine multiple systems. We tied multiple systems to combine them into one ServiceNow offering. We wanted to consolidate 50 or more systems into a single system and Service Now is one of the two options we looked at that was able to do that.

The deployment process is basically about requiring, gathering, and then developing or customizing the product itself for the workflows and then deploying it out into the field. It's really pretty simple, as long as you stick to a lot of the out-of-box functionality. 

When you start to get away from the out-of-box functionality, you can really link in the deployment process. Anything that you go out past that out-of-box functionality, you can really hurt yourself. Basically, it has the capability of getting very complicated. However, if you stick to out-of-the-box, it's simple. We personally found that out the hard way.

For us, the deployment process took two years. 

We recruited some outside help to assist us in the implementation. We found that having experts on hand was extremely beneficial.

I'd recommend outside help. There are definitely some nuances within the deployment that having some experts within Service Now is very helpful - especially when you're first time to have some outside thinking. 

Our organization has noticed an ROI. They're happy with it.

The licensing needs to offer a variety of levels to meet what an organization actually needs. Right now, it's all or nothing, and that can get costly.

We also evaluated SAP against ServiceNow. We ended up choosing ServiceNow in the end, however, I can't recall what the deciding factor or factors were.

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We are using the FAAS version of the solution currently.

I would advised those companies considering the solution to take advantage of what the programs do rather rather than try to lift and shift.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten overall.

We use ServiceNow for all service delivering processes within service management. For service and incident problems, change and configuration management, relief management, and event management.

Within our organization, there are roughly 30,000 users, using ServiceNow.

From a service perspective, I think that being able to customize it great. It's a very low-code platform, and it's simple. The user experience is also really good.

From a configuration/discovery perspective, how you map your infrastructure and the relationship — that could be improved in a sense to make it simpler. I know that discovery tools are not meant to be simple, but somehow, if they could make it more simple and robust, that would be great.

You just need plenty of experience with the solution, then it becomes much easier to use.

Other than that, I can't think of anything else that I would like ServiceNow to include in the next release. 

I have been using ServiceNow for two years.

ServiceNow is very stable. The scalability is also great.

I can't evaluate their technical support because I don't get support from ServiceNow myself. I'm responsible for implementing it for our clients, but we don't provide support.

The initial setup was very easy.

Initially, deployment took us eight months. Once we had some experience with it, we could deploy it in four months.

My advice would be to evaluate the license more — seriously look into their licensing options. The way that ServiceNow licenses the product, there is no concurrent user model so you have to pay for each user, and each type of user, that uses the tool. It can be very expensive depending on how you use it. Sometimes you cannot implement other modules because they don't have a budget for that. So make sure you correctly look over the different types of licenses to make sure you understand what to expect.

ServiceNow should review and make the solution more flexible for clients who have more users, or users that are not concurring, to know how to share licenses. To have options depending on how the client wants to use them so that everyone can benefit from it — that would be my advice. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give ServiceNow a rating of eight.

We use it for ITIL/ITOM catalog of services. ServiceNow is the CMDB for our organization, and we use the Discovery, Incident Management, Change and Project Management tools within ServiceNow to keep a centralized view of our enterprise. We have recently begun implementing the Governance and Risk (GRC) features as well.

Discovery has reduced, on average, the time to build/deploy devices within our environment by one hour. This may not seem like much but it adds up over time. It also reaps additional time savings with its ability to capture changes through subsequent discoveries over the life of the device. Discovery is the first piece in the CMDB chain for our organization, making sure that the device appears in the CMDB before it is needed (for, say, a change request).

ServiceNow Discovery is very valuable. It does, however, come at a steep cost of time and effort to implement it correctly. Do not be fooled into thinking it will "just work." Discovery, within any platform, requires meticulous planning and management to have it work for you. No discover solution is ever the "silver bullet" either, so plan to have more than one discovery engine implemented to cover your enterprise.

Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential.

Microsoft has caused some issues recently with its decision to move away from SNMP and WMI in favor of PowerShell management. ServiceNow will need to make changes to move away from these deprecated services and to discover these devices. Discovery engines universally rely upon SNMP to detect, at least at an initial level, what type of device they are talking to. Without SNMP, some other platform will need to advertise the device and its capabilities. Most applications offer API (ideally REST-based) connectivity and ServiceNow should expand upon its use of these connections.

The SaaS platform has been very reliable. ServiceNow has been one of the few SaaS solutions that we have chosen that has not had major issues. The agility to provide test/dev instances, and the seamless access provided by their support team, have been essential in allowing us to work with the solution.

As designed, the solution is incredibly scalable. It is possible for a customer to create logic, processes, or other rules that will hinder or limit this scalability, but that is not the fault of the platform. Having a knowledgeable staff and/or partner will reap huge dividends in the scale of the implementation.

Technical support is very good. Like in any support organization, there can be technicians who do not meet your requirements, but the vast majority of the ServiceNow support engineers have been helpful. As a side note, support is delivered via predominately Indian personnel. This is common in the IT industry, but we have seen it almost exclusively with ServiceNow support.

We used the CMDB that is offered within the product that we make/sell ourselves (Plex Online). It was not designed to meet the needs of a software company and we took the opportunity to move to something that was a better fit.

The initial setup was incredibly complex. I would pity any customer who decided to self-implement ServiceNow, unless they have experienced, dedicated staff for the length of the implementation. I was largely dedicated to the implementation of the CMDB, Event, Incident, and Discovery pieces of our implementation, with the help of an outside consulting firm, and it still took up a massive amount of my time to implement.

Many parts of the ServiceNow solution do work out-of-the-box. Being flexible also means being complex. Rarely can you just apply a change to all areas or systems. Screens (or forms) are unique to just about every part of the system, so if you want a uniform look and feel you will need to touch a lot of places.

Even if you do not think you will need an on-staff ServiceNow developer, you will want one. Many of the changes to the system are too involved for a standard admin to make (confidently) and there will be no shortage of ongoing work to keep this person (or persons) employed full-time.

We deployed in stages, bringing certain modules online as we were satisfied with the functionality. We are truly still implementing. The core of the system necessary for day-to-day operations was deployed in about one year. But changes and features are still being implemented. We continue to add and subtract from the system as we use it and as ServiceNow offers new or enhanced functionality. We also continue to develop integrations with other business systems.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we took on the system in phases. CMDB was first. This was perceived as necessary for all other functions for our organization since we are using it for ITIL/ITOM. The CMDB was manually populated and maintained at first, while Discovery was implemented. Project came next, along with Time Tracking. After that was Incident, Problem, and Change.

We kept to an Agile deployment methodology focusing on the small pieces needed to keep moving the larger whole along. Customization was kept to a minimum (where possible).

We did use a third-party service provider but it did not go well. I still could not imagine attempting to do it without them, but two years later, we are still replacing much of the work they did. There is a cautionary tale here of not going with the lowest bid.

The biggest failure on the part of our partner was with Discovery. They did not have the depth of knowledge necessary to get this delivered on time or, in fact, working in general. The level of effort needed to implement Discovery, in the end, dwarfed the rest of the platform. The partner absorbed the cost since they failed to understand exactly what it would take to deliver.

We have not done an actual ROI evaluation at this point. We determined that it was necessary from a business standpoint to change to a scalable SaaS solution and ROI was not necessary as part of the project scope. I believe that through Discovery and Automation we could likely create an ROI case. In other aspects, systems like Change and Incident may have introduced some toil to our process, but this may eventually become less of an issue as we continue to refine our process.

Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive.

We evaluated Service Cloud and ScienceLogic. ServiceNow really seemed to have the most complete offering.

If you plan on using Discovery, double whatever hours/manpower/money you had planned that it would cost. Do not let sales convince you that any part of the system "just works." You will ultimately end up modifying absolutely everything. Definitely look at using a reputable partner for implementation, unless you have a dedicated knowledgeable staff of ServiceNow users who have done it before (and not who just went through training).

We have 60 users for ITIL. We have provided limited access to our development and external management users.

For maintenance, we have two full-time employees. One is a dedicated ServiceNow developer tasked with customization and managing version upgrades. The other maintains the CMDB and Discovery process. I could see adding one more of each.

Deployment was an entire team effort, with different teams championing different modules of the application. At any given time, there were ten to 15 internal employees working on implementation with the assistance of five partner resources.

ServiceNow manages and maintains our ITOM/ITIL daily operations. It is a core piece of our environment that will only continue to grow. We have thought about removing the ITOM piece as we have not been able to implement or leverage it as we had initially planned, but we are still working on understanding what other tools we would need to replace the features and functionality. The primary limit we have on increasing usage across our company is the cost to license ITIL users.

The analytics - we like to keep track of how much work everyone is doing. We need to make sure that everyone is being efficient and being utilized. At the same time, regarding hardware, we want to make sure all the hardware is being utilized.

The other valuable feature is the asset management. It is the same thing, but with hardware. We want to know how much hardware - computers and anything else that we have in stock before we actually order them. Again, it probably boils down to the cost.

We're getting a good cost-efficiency. In my line of work, we deploy between 50 to 80 computers per day, break/fix new computers, laptops, you name it, we have it. We want to keep track of whether or not we need to replace a whole laptop, or just replace a hardware component that's failing on it. At the same time, we also want to make sure that we're keeping on par with the new technology, so that way we don't get left behind.

Most people are discussing UIs, but I'm a developer. I would say 80-90% of the people would appreciate that, that's easy for them, but from a developer perspective, it's hard for me, because for me it's clunky. Just give me a spreadsheet or give me a Notepad and I can write it down. For me, I would rather have that - give me an option to do that, maybe a CLI, instead of a UI.

Earlier today we were doing things such as merging data. What happened was I tried to merge one company to another. It's the same company, it's just a misspelled name. There was a bug - that there was supposed to be an undo button, but it wasn't there. It's one of those things, but then I asked a person how to do it, and they can't figure it out.

ServiceNow is such a complex piece of software. It's trying to be everything. The way I look at it, sooner or later, it's going to fail, because it's trying to do a lot of stuff. I can't say what or where, but it will. We've seen it a lot of times already with other products. You can't be everything, and that's what they're trying to do.

We don't really use much of ServiceNow except for the ticketing system, for now, so we don't have any issues. If there's a new hire we can add them fine, and it's quick. If there is new hardware, our admin just creates a new hardware form, and it's there, so I don't see any problem with that.

From my standpoint it's easy. As long as you attend an event where they teach you how to do it, you'll pick it up right away, because before I attended one, I had no clue how ServiceNow worked. I went to one for three days and now I at least have, about 25% knowledge of how ServiceNow works. I guess if you attend an event, you'll pick it up right away.

Right now we use ServiceNow, we use SCCM, we use Case. It's three different bits of software but basically what we use them for is as a reporting tool, like I said for the analytics of how we need hardware or tickets are coming in, but ServiceNow is mostly just for tickets.

Granted there's pros and cons in being everything that it wants to be. In our experience, we have Case, we have SCCM: sure, you're generating a report in SECM, and then you're generating another report in Case, there's a slight chance that the result will be different. If you have one thing, one software that's doing everything for you, the reports and the results will be consistent. I see that it's not done yet, it's not complete yet, but in the long run I also see it coming up with a bunch of problems.

The first thing is it's openness, since we're a Remedy shop right now. With Remedy, half of it's probably how we implemented but it's very closed off. It's really difficult to get anything new added to it. 

The big 'features' are the openness and ease of use. It's very intuitive, and it seems very straightforward to the point where, "It's got to be something I'm missing here." It's very simple to do things versus Remedy. I feel like, "Are there features missing here?" It doesn't seem hard enough to use. 

I went through training and everything. I realize that it does as much as Remedy plus much more. Openness and ease of use are the two big things right there.

We have Remedy right now, and currently, we struggle with process, as does everyone, so we're hoping that because ServiceNow is easier to use, easier to build and that we can actually get our processes up and running. I know personally you have to have processes before you buy a tool set. We tend to do it at the same time. The whole business that with this new tool set we can finally get our processes define, implemented, because that's really a struggle.

I don't have enough experience to really say a lot about this. Maybe, the one thing we're looking for especially, after being at Knowledge 16 is best practices. I'm looking at it going, "I'm a developer by training. I could cause so many problems with this system. I could create things in it that I shouldn't. I could use it for things that I shouldn't."

That's the one thing, it's like a Swiss Army Knife. I shouldn't do surgery with it, but I probably could. That'll probably be the biggest thing, is right now since we're new to it. We need to learn how to answer "What shouldn't we do?" It's so flexible to actually build things with, it's what should we do and what shouldn't we do that we need to determine.

We've got Remedy completely tailored for us, and now we have to upgrade but can't. So we need to figure out what we can and can't do so we don't run into the same upgrade problems with ServiceNow. We are working with Fruition Partners and they're doing all of our implementation. We're looking to them to help us with some of that.

We haven't used it in production yet so I can't really answer.

We're on Remedy now, and we implemented a previous version of it about 10 years ago. We made tons of changes and customizations to it. When it came time to do the upgrade we couldn't.

We're working with Fruition Partners to implement it.

If you have an existing Remedy installation I'd say, "Run, run away from it. Run to ServiceNow." To me that's a no-brainer. If you have nothing I would ask to get a demo to understand what ServiceNow will do for you. You need to really get into the whole ITLL realm and get some training. The thing would be is to realize what it can do for your company. What we've really done is realized what going in that direction can actually do for our company. Therefore, this is a far superior tool to implement that.

Again, it's a tool, it's not going to help you if you don't have that great understanding of processes. The first step would be is get some kind of a basic demo. Understand ITIL and really look at it and see how can help you guys.