Cherwell Software was founded by the former CEO of FrontRage Solutions and is a full suite of service management tools competing with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, and IBM SmartCloud.
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Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Ivanti Neurons for ITSM offers the flexibility to deploy in the cloud, on-premises or a hybrid combination. It replaces the Ivanti Service Manager, powered by Heat.
CIT had used HEAT for 15 years, which was about 10 years more than we should have. Our HEAT implementation was extremely customized and though we used HEAT well and our processes were melded with HEAT, there were many areas for improvement. Tickets would get lost or a task …
There is no comparison. Ivanti Neurons for ITSM (Ivanti Service Manager) outperforms them all. ServiceNow looks great on the surface and has amazing marketing, however you need deep pockets and a very long implementation cycle. BMC's Track-It and Remedy are near end of life. …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Cherwell is not widely used in South Africa. For us, it was vital to have local representation and partners to assist with support and development.
Well suited in an IT environment where you have limited staff. It can be managed by one administrator. Reliability of the SaaS environment has been excellent. Flexibility in developing automated workflows to open, manage, and close Incidents. Change Management due to ability to modify OOB to meet the needs of our staff. Contract Management allowing us to be notified when a contract or license is up for renewal and setting reminders. Integrations are not easy to create and manage.
We have been able to integrate our ISM system with Active Directory using API calls to automate user account creation and user Moves, Adds, and Changes. This has helped us make the employee onboarding and offboarding process much more efficient and less error prone. We cut down on mundane work for the account creation team and freed them to do more tier 2 and 3 tasks. Where the system has been less appropriate for us is trying to integrate non-IT service processes. We haven't gotten a lot of buy-in from groups that aren't used to using an IT related system to receive tasks. It will take some time for us to make a more user friendly, non-IT, Support role.
Cherwell's email handling automation works flawlessly. The only time that I have ever needed to reset the automation service that drives it is when my own server that houses the small connecting agent has some kind of problem and disconnects us from our hosted Cherwell instance. It just works. Emails to a certain address always result in a new ticket or update to an existing ticket.
Cherwell is literally 100% customization in so many ways that it would be pointless to try to enumerate them. There is a very sizable list of already-created customizations (called "mApps") that you can download and apply to your instance. If you don't like them you can roll them back in seconds. But you can add and configure entire modules using one of these pre-defined, completely free, add-on packages. It's so easy to add features this way that I check the list of available mApps every month or so just to see what functionality I can add.
Very good at allowing a service line to configure the product to suit its needs. This is important so as to not have to craft operations around the technology, but the other way around!
A high level of flexibility to implement a great deal of automation. The product gives end users access to pre-defined or custom business rules and workflows as well as the ability to implement other forms of time savers!
There is a very comprehensive Help guide for end users and administrators alike. Quite often I have found the most obscure 'How To's' in this guide rather than needing to call into support or search out information on the Ivanti site.
Cherwell is still the best tool for the job in the market. Even though Ivanti bought them and are trying to convince everyone to move over to Neurons for ITSM, they have stated Cherwell will remain supported indefinitely and have a roadmap for future Cherwell development. Unfortunately, ISM is not as flexible as Cherwell (and the UX is atrocious), hence why many people are sticking with Cherwell (and why many Cherwell customers never purchased ISM originally)
I enjoy the layout and configuration of our Cherwell Service Management instance. It did take me a bit to get used to, as with any new ticketing system, but now that I understand the system more, I thoroughly enjoy it! There are just so many options and the UI is very intuitive.
There's two sides to answering this question. From an Agent/Admin perspective, it's great. You can do a lot of really cool things and have a lot of options and tools available to you. From a customer perspective, you're not quite as spoilt for choice. Ivanti has been working on and improving their new mobile-responsive customer interface but in doing so have really limited the features they allow admins to configure. We've found this limiting but not unworkable. I hope this continues to improve.
The browser client is mostly acceptable in terms of performance, but still lacks parity with the rich client. The rich client is not very performant at all. It's built on old architecture and relies heavily on a fast internet connection, good caching and database indexing. There are several unwritten rules with form design (and form arrangement) which most users are not aware of, but can severely impact performance in the rich client. This is where the flexibility of Cherwell can come back to bite you if you step outside the boundaries of these unwritten rules
We generally have a good time with Cherwell support, however, there are the few niche cases where I have to explain how Cherwell works to the customer support agent on the other end. A little more product education for tier 1 support could go a long way in helping expedite support requests from SaaS customers.
Support has been amazing. They are knowledgeable, respectful, efficient, and friendly. When something doesn't go according to plan, they go above and beyond to make sure your issues are resolved. I have come to think of them as an extension of my team!
I didn't partake in the in-person training, but it was available. I preferred the online method instead, which was a great experience. It was nice to have someone available to bounce questions off of and demonstrate how certain functions worked.
The training was great! We got together to review the system, its UI, and how to perform basic functions. Then there was plenty of time to ask questions and test out the system while there was someone available to assist.
Implementation is a breeze. Each time I've implemented it, we had an outsourced vendor overseeing it & assisting where needed. However, Cherwell OOTB is ready to go, and configuring it for LDAP/SAML, etc. for authentication and user-imports is really straight forward. The infrastructure needed for Cherwell is extremely simple too - and installing the server & database takes no more than 20 mins
Much more customizable than other products, especially when ran in a self-hosted environment. Cherwell [Service Management] allows for greater flexibility of custom development and integrations to allow for automating tasks that traditional ITSM apps are not well suited for. Cherwell [Service Management] gives you the freedom to develop your own objects with minimal licensing costs.
Ivanti is far more user friendly than ManageEngine, and has more features than Jira Service Management. It takes longer to get used to Ivanti because of the extra features, but once you're on board with how it works and how to make changes, the possibilities and configuration options are almost endless
We have never had any major show-stopper issues with Cherwell itself - more so with the infrastructure it sits on. Moving from in-house cloud (on Cherwell's side), to AWS then to Azure has caused multiple problems over the years (some still on-going), however the product has remained fairly stable
As mentioned, they were always great to work with (minus the project management side). My only feedback would be to push back on requirements that don't make sense
There are many companies for you to choose from. Many have expertise in specific areas. I highly recommend making sure you find one that can work for your specific project needs and then be willing to go in a different direction if needed. There are a few companies that have the personnel to cover everyone's basis but truthfully not many.
As with any standard ticketing system, it helped decrease the time before first contact with clients.
Our department was always concerned with keeping a low budget, and it was cheaper than most.
My supervisor could easily tell how many resources were being put into each employee, so we had more visibility of our team's capabilities at a given time if we needed to take on something complex.
In the Classroom Support department, this has provided a quick access system available via tablet for technicians on the go and has improved response time.
In the Helpdesk, this has assisted in the automation of repetitive tasks and assisted with providing better accountability for the completion of an assigned task.
