ServiceNow Competitors – Are There Any
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ServiceNow competitors—are there any?

With 200+ viable choices in the market, of course, there are options for IT departments looking to deploy or replace their current IT Service Management (ITSM) solution. ServiceNow is looked at as the tool to beat; however, is it the best tool for you? Have you considered looking at other ServiceNow alternatives?

ServiceNow competitors may be right for you!

While no one will be fired for choosing ServiceNow over the competition, sometimes you get more from the little guy than you do from Goliath.

Back in the ’80s, when computing power was beginning to rise, no one got fired for buying IBM. The same can now be said of ServiceNow. It offers a robust, enterprise-level, end-to-end solution for a variety of organizational use cases with essential features and functionality. It’s a scalable cloud solution that enables both process workflow automation and a variety of technology integrations.

However, the solution comes with a hefty price and tool complexity. This makes customers question the value received versus the ServiceNow licensing costs. This is especially true for organizations struggling to gain budget approval to address a simple business need without breaking the bank. So, is there an alternative to ServiceNow?

If your requirement for an operational service platform consists of a traditional ITSM, IT Asset Management (ITAM), Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and/or IT discovery functionality, you may want to look at an alternative for ServiceNow.

ServiceNow pros and cons

The pros and cons of ServiceNow are as follows –

The Pros

  • It is a cloud-based PaaS with a strong global presence
  • Its AI/ML features help users improve automation processes based on previous interactions and predictive analysis
  • Includes various support options
  • Fully customizable help desk solution that can run on a mobile phone

The Cons

  • The fully packed navigation panel of ServiceNow may be confusing to those who want to use only a part of it
  • The upfront cost is very high for startups
  • The plugins and solutions are expensive and may require professional assistance

ServiceNow may be great for companies that want to automate all the IT support processes and make huge investments. But it is not the right solution when you want to automate only a part of the IT services at a great value.

What are ServiceNow competitors offering?

Many ServiceNow competitors offer robust ITSM applications without the heavy ServiceNow licensing fees and adoption costs. This makes even large organizations want to shop around before taking the inevitable plunge into ServiceNow. 

When this occurs, the organization takes a more in-depth look at its real organizational requirements for addressing service management, IT asset management, CMDB, and/or discovery gaps in place today. 

One quickly realizes that many ServiceNow competitors, such as Virima, provide this integrated functionality at an improved value and lower cost, than ServiceNow.

Having a Configuration Management Database

Implementing a CMDB enables ITSM technologies to leverage device and asset configuration data to support service management processes such as 

  • Service Request Management
  • Incident Management 
  • Knowledge Management
  • Problem Management 

Also, an out-of-box technology integration between change management and the CMDB enables organizations to evaluate the risks of proposed change requests to infrastructure devices. Also, helps to ensure that configuration changes are properly reflected within the CMDB. 

A value that is immediately realized by all IT areas and the related IT stakeholders.

Why do CMDB initiatives fail often?

The number one  reason due to which CMDB initiatives fail is having too many manual support processes to build and maintain a CMDB. Change within IT is constant, and when timely manual updates are not made the CMDB data becomes outdated and inaccurate. 

The stakeholder confidence in the CMDB data and its accuracy erodes, and the gold standard data source becomes disparate spreadsheets and databases within departments. This results in the CMDB becoming unreliable for operational and business needs.

In order to maintain an accurate CMDB, you need a system that can automate discovery, populate and maintain accurate data, and provide insightful visualizations. With modern, user-friendly solutions like Virima CMDB, you can see all of your assets in one place, along with their current status and maintenance history. Virima CMDB leverages automated discovery to populate and maintain accurate data while dashboards and ViVID Services Maps provide insightful CMDB visualizations of asset relationships, service dependencies, and availability status. Your manual processes are reduced and your data accuracy improves significantly with Virima.

Application and service dependency mapping

Application and service dependency mapping is another common requirement when deploying a CMDB solution. 

Mapping device/application/service interdependencies offers many benefits to ITSM operational processes concerning incidents, problems, change, configuration, and knowledge and can help with audits – compliance, financial, and IT security. 

ServiceNow does offer a dependency and service mapping solution, but here again, both the cost and complexity to license and deploy can be quite high.  

Unfortunately, the number of ServiceNow competitors that offer a unified ITSM, CMDB, IT Discovery, and Service Mapping solution shrinks quite extensively.

Given how critical an accurate CMDB with well-mapped services is to realizing ITSM’s full value, why settle for anything less? 

Many ServiceNow buyers are challenged here as too much of the project budget goes to deploying the core ITSM functionality resulting in difficulty to acquire ServiceNow’s discovery and service mapping functionality due to an unexpected increase in the CMDB project budget being required.

(See, “What is ServiceNow CMDB Best Practice?”)

So instead of thinking only ServiceNow can offer the ideal solution to deliver IT service management excellence, consider ServiceNow competitor solutions. Solutions like Virima may be able to offer everything needed operationally at a significantly lower cost and with much less complexity.

With ViVID (Virima Visual Impact Display) Service Mapping, you can see the big picture and make sure that everything fits together.

ViVID provides application and service dependency mapping with dynamic visual depictions of your IT infrastructure, application dependencies, business services, and ITSM process relationships. You can see where everything is connected—and how it all fits together—in one easy-to-navigate map. You’ll also be able to spot problems quickly when they arise—and troubleshoot faster than ever before!

What if investment in ServiceNow ITSM has already been made?

To this point, we have discussed competitive offerings to ServiceNow ITSM. However, what if you’ve already made that investment, and you’re just looking for an alternative to ServiceNow CMDB discovery and service mapping? Or, perhaps seeking an alternative IT Asset Management (ITAM) and/or CMDB solution that can be integrated into the ServiceNow platform?

Virima offers standalone IT discovery, CMDB, and ITAM capabilities with premium features and functionality that fully integrates with ServiceNow ITSM. This comes at significantly lower licensing costs than ServiceNow’s offering and is easier to deploy. 

Virima has both agentless and agent-based discovery technologies that are included with built-in automatic application dependency and service topology mapping functionality.

What advice does Virima offer?

Do what our customers have done: keep an open mind, perform some research, and identify two to three solutions to compare with in-house trials. 

It starts with understanding your basic needs as well as what additional capabilities you would like to have. It’s easy to get caught up in a lot of marketing and sales hype, but figure out what’s realistic from an organizational and budget perspective.

Here are some key points to consider:

Do you require more than traditional ITSM functionality?

  • Incident Management
  • Problem Management
  • Change Management
  • Request Fulfillment
  • Knowledge Management
  • Survey Management
  • Service Asset Configuration Management
  • Release Management
  • Self-Service Portal
  • Contract/Vendor Management

Is your environment well documented?

  • Do you know about all your hardware and software assets?
  • Can you build a trustworthy CMDB with what you have?
  • How will it be maintained?
  • Are critical dependencies and relationships fully understood?
  • How will the solution be implemented and supported?
  • Trained and dedicated FTEs
  • Vendor and contract resources
  • Combination of all three?
  • What’s the process and time to implement?

Is the solution easy to deploy and flexible enough to meet your existing processes or will you be forced into significant changes?

Will the vendor be responsive to your unique needs/challenges?

Will it make a positive difference in the way you operate today?

Determining the right solution

Before spending more than is needed for a solution, organizations should determine exactly which features are important to them and purchase a solution that’s apt for their needs and pocketbook. 

ServiceNow’s high price tag is the cost of its ability to offer end-to-end enterprise service management capabilities as well as domain separation for managed service providers (MSPs). And many of these features aren’t needed by most organizations.

At the end of the day, solutions from ServiceNow competitors can offer fantastic tactical support for all asset and service management needs of an average IT organization. Selecting the best software platform for service mapping, ITAM, ITSM, and CMDB comes down to who gives you the most value out of your investment. 

Virima features can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services, and your users.

Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!

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