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Desk.com (discontinued) vs. IBM Business Automation Workflow

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Desk.com (discontinued)

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/ADesk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A

    IBM Business Automation Workflow

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AIBM Business Automation Workflow is a solution that helps users automate digital workflows to increase productivity, efficiency and insights — on premises or on cloud.N/A
    Pricing
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Considered Both Products
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    IBM
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    78%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    83%
    Happy with the feature set
    15 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    85%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    11 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Desk.com (discontinued) and IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    26% above category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Process Engine
    Comparison of Process Engine features of Desk.com (discontinued) and IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    18% above category average
    Process designer00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Process simulation00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
    Business rules engine00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    SOA support00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Process player00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
    Support for modeling languages00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Form builder00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Model execution00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Collaboration
    Comparison of Collaboration features of Desk.com (discontinued) and IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    3 Ratings
    18% above category average
    Social collaboration tools00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
    Content Management Capabilties
    Comparison of Content Management Capabilties features of Desk.com (discontinued) and IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    IBM Business Automation Workflow
    10.0
    4 Ratings
    21% above category average
    Content management00 Ratings10.04 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Small Businesses
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Process Street
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    TIBCO® BPM Enterprise
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    IBM Blueworks Live
    Score9.1 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.2
    (38 ratings)
    10.0
    (8 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (14 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (19 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.2
    (21 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Desk.com (discontinued)IBM Business Automation Workflow
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Have your process first on paper Its important to first document the process before venturing into BPMS. It will save a lot of pain and heartaches. A BPM tool is no magic bullet, it merely automates your process. Its upto you to put visibility and tracking on top of it. Provide monitoring so that you get a chance to improve your process continously. BPM is not an application If you are trying to build an application with BPM, chances are that your are alraedy failing. BPM must be a strategic initiative for an organization. Yes, you build Dashboards, Reports and other software in BPMS, however you do it at a process level not at an application level. http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/bpm-initiative.html Know the difference between process data and business data http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2011/05/lombardi-best-practices.html http://bpmstech.blogspot.com/2012/02/bpm-system-architecture.html
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
    • Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
    • Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • System does a great job normalizing business process and automating order processing tasks. Before TeamWorks, the process was much more manual and more expensive staff ($65k to $70K) were required to manage the process. Since implementing TeamWorks, we need much lower-skilled workers to manage order processing.
    • System ensures that we have consistent data across all systems.
    • Rules engine is really the “company playbook” – it is the heart and soul of how the company works. It handles thousands of orders per day
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
    • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
    • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
    • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
    • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • The system gets crashed when many instances go into the queue stage. The system even crashes and sometimes restarts automatically when the load on the server increases. We had to develop a separate software for this and maintain the same.
    • We cannot manipulate the data during run time. It is difficult to develop user-interfaces with complex functionality.
    • In order to consume external services that follow HTTP protocol, we need to use IDE for that, and consuming services from IDE takes a lot of time to give a response.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    This particular decision will be made by other people. Overall IBM BPM is the best BPM engine that I have worked with. It is implemented at our company and IT and business are already somewhat familiar with it. Therefore if asked I will recommend renewal as long as the price is reasonable.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • The system is easy enough to use but, by definition, is a complex tool. However, they have done a good job generally balancing tool complexity / capability with usability. When comparing to MS Biz Talk, for example, Biz Talk has less functionality but is actually harder to use.
    • Software is very flexible. For somebody with the right technical background, it’s quite easy to write some Java code to overcome any hurdles or make the product do what is needed
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Discontinued Products
    We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Discontinued Products
    Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
    Read full review
    IBM
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Issues can be raised through tickets and it works based on the priority of the issue. The Support Team response is also good and the solution is provided in a short span of time. In a case where the issue is serious, they try to find out the root cause and provide an alternative for it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    • Attended on premise sysadmin training for 4 days, 8 hours per day. Although further follow-up training was available, I never felt the need to go back. Training was very hands-on with real modeling (rather than just following a manual). Very effective.
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
    Read full review
    IBM
    • Very satisfied – not too difficult at all.
    • We had a consultant available as part of our contract, but we didn’t really need to use (except for some advice on ActiveDirectory and single sign-on)
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    Pega Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product. However Pega, falls short on integration centric capabilities and very rigid to customize. On the other hand IBM comes with array of products which suits needs of varying degree. Advanced integration is solved by BPEL Process Server which has support for state based patterns and mediation. Dynamic rules and event management can be solved with WODM, Cloud to on-premise connectivity with Cast Iron, Enterprise gateway and security usecases with DataPower, Social BPM with IBM BPM , WODM, mobify with Worklight. Pega has a little bit of eveything here and there. It solves the dynamic rule management, brings out the flavor of Social BPM and mobility with Antenna ( I guess) and predictive analytics as well in one single suite. There are certain usecases which needs to have a little bit of everything, however this little bits and pieces of functionality when its blows, Pega would have problems to scale. With IBM its a bit nightmare to maintain a variety of technologies, however you can wish to go for one without the other and go for something only when you truly need it. Pega vs IBM Its difficult to pick a winner. In nutshell when you want a full scale BPM with rich integration capabilities go for IBM BPM. On the other hand if you hava mature integration capability already, Pega can yield quick results for you as well. Pega's strength is its methodology. IBM BPM's strength is integration. Actually you can't go wrong with both in terms of implementation. My strong recommendation is to invest time to process analysis and pick a good vendor to support consulting and implementation.
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    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    IBM
    It scales from small team interactions to business processes serving thousands of employees, as well as straight-through-processing needs that go well beyond. Of course, scale is always in the eye of the beholder, but IBM BPM does a good job of giving you all of the hooks, APIs, and data that you need to take on whatever scaling approaches you need to meet the load
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    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
    • It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
    • The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    IBM
    • It has added value to the upper management to give visibility into what is happening at any time in the enterprise.
    • Boosted employee morale because it gives them all the information to work the case/task in a single location.
    • Identifies bottlenecks and improves the turnover.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

    Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics