Item: Cherwell Service Management (discontinued)
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cherwell Service Management

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cherwell Service Management for enterprise IT Service Management. We are currently using Incident, Change, Problem and CMDB. We are in the process of implementing Purchasing and Asset Management.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Single platform that is easily managed.
Customer service and support is outstanding.
Continuous improvement of the product - new features (which are frequently customer driven) are added regularly at no additional cost.
Very easy to learn for users, administrators and developers.
Licensing model is simple and flexible - can implement perpetual and subscription in one instance. Migrate from SaaS to on premises or third party cloud with little effort and at low to no cost.
Database is not overly normalized. Very easy to understand and query.

Cons

Documentation is improving but is still incomplete.
"Codeless" architecture is great and easy to learn but it would be nice to have the a "power user" interface option to allow writing of things like expressions rather than click through drop downs.
Web UI is a bit slow and still not on par with the features of the client application.

Return on Investment

Considerable improvement in ticket resolution times.
Significant reduction in issues and collisions due to changes.
Major reduction in phone calls to service desk due to automated email processing and self-service.
Improved forecasting and process analysis with reporting tools including dashboards, trend analysis, ad-hoc queries, etc.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow and LANDESK Management Suite

We found Cherwell to offer the best value when considering the features we needed, our organizational maturity and anticipated growth. CAPEX and OPEX were lowest, in some cases by orders of magnitude, of other products evaluated.

One key differentiator is the concurrent license model used by Cherwell vs. the named user license model used by others. We have several users who access the solution once or twice a month at most. This makes the named user license model very costly.

The other products have superior documentation and a much broader catalog of tools beyond ITSM, but for our requirements and maturity these were not important.

Likelihood to Recommend

Cherwell is a great choice for all organizations looking for an IT Service Management solution. It can scale to any size organization and training and support is great for those just getting started with ITIL-focused support.

For organizations seeking a platform that provides extensive capabilities beyond IT Service Management there may be better choices.

Cherwell Service Management (discontinued) Feature Ratings

Comments

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Tom Diersch
commented 8 years ago
Could you expand on the comment ....may not support those organizations that require "extensive capabilities beyond IT Service Management " What capabilities are you seeing that may be required but are not available?
Review author
commented 8 years ago
For example, ServiceNow offers enterprise class solutions such as HR, PMO, Legal, Finance, etc. that are built on the same platform. For some organizations this is an advantage, though we tend to avoid getting in too deep with a single vendor. Integrating Cherwell with other solutions is pretty straightforward.
- Tom Diersch
  commented 8 years ago
  Thanks for the note. I am interested in the PMO item but not the others. I think that there is a link between work done to support systems and work done in projects, especially in IT

Complete solution tha's easy to deploy and manage