> All, > A little birdie was chirping the other day and I heard something about > SNow having an integration or some type of implementation scenario > where it is taking the place of SRM But still have AR and ITSM on the > fulfillment side. I'm sure it's possible but my question to you folks > is: > 1. Have you done it > 2. If so, what gives? How'd it go? > > I understand the drawbacks so we don't have to go there but feel free > if you'd like :) > > Sent from my iPhone
Interesting rumor. Although I cannot say I disbelieve it – I have seen customers throw away $10M in Tivoli work, so getting one competitor's ITSM system to replace the module of another competitor's is certainly within the bounds of believability – it does seem likely to fail. My background: I have a customer considering moving to ServiceNow (and many other products have been considered, and they are still on Remedy, so don't try to imply anything from this statement) for a number of reasons. I decided to understand what ServiceNow was truly offering, because their demo looked damned good. So, I went out and got my own development instance of ServiceNow will all the modules on it. ServiceNow came up recently when what appeared to be a troll made a statement (then ran) about how much better SNOW was than BMC Remedy ITSM. Doug M. came online to refute the parts of what he said about BMC's product. One statement he made about the competitor was that its *application suite* was much less mature than Remedy's. He is absolutely correct. If you want to "do ITIL" with their ITSM product, you likely have a bit of coding to do. SNOW's philosophy is the "build up" from the base applications. Currently they are in a state much better than the old "Help Desk templates" (if you remember them), and probably even Help Desk 3.0 – but not much more. They can show you a bunch of bells and whistles, but when it comes to the richness of the relationships between modules, it is just not there. Now that may be good for your customer. Maybe they are the types that like to kid themselves that they are doing "best practices" and "following ITIL" when in reality the inmates are running the asylum with management's blessing. (We have all been to that shop, 'eh?) A minimalist approach might be just the ticket. Better than taking a complex, rich app like Remedy's and cutting or turning off major chunks of it. If your customer is not even close to standard – say a government entity :^) – and they have a lot of special requirements, it might be easier to build up from SNOW without all of that clutter you might not use. Who knows? But the initial pricing, which is what so many frustrated customers who are considering switching from whatever vendor they have, are considering. How little will it cost me to get out from under what I have now. Under the covers SNOW is like Remedy ARS in many (general) respects. You put fields on forms and that creates the underlying database structure for you. You fill out forms and put in logic and it creates workflow for you. It has a fully graphical editor for some (but not all) workflow that allows admins to "develop". Neat stuff, but in the end, very similar to ARS. So, would you bet on using Remedy as a front-end to, say one of CA's modules? I don't think so. For that reason alone, I think using SNOW to front-end SRM is lunacy. Doesn't mean someone isn't trying it though. From SNOW's perspective, it is a toehold to replace one part of a legacy system. It is just one step towards replacing all the rest, and they just might be willing to take a bet on that, if the customer is big enough. Interesting idea though. For all those out there curious about SNOW, you can get on their demo servers, for free, as a full-blown admin, and start coding away. (Don't expect to find it there the next day, however, as they re-image the machines most nights.) THAT will give you a real feel for how easy - or hard - it is to develop in SNOW. When my customer first got serious about SNOW, I went to their classes in San Diego (at my own expense). I got excited about the product, purely from a developer's viewpoint. It is cool. But, implement a major customer in six months? Get serious! Dale Hurtt SPEC IT LLC _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
