FrontRange ITSM - Anyone using it?

[rjp]

FrontRange released a new SM solution early this year called ITSM - that is, it is not Heat but a whole new game.

We have been looking at it as a possible buy. I'd like to get the opinions of anyone who has been using it, or is in the middle of a deployment, or knows someone who is.

Obviously the pre-sales guys are only going to put us in touch with their fans - I'd like to hear about some the pain

[ANeill]

We've brought ITSM and are just starting our Incident Management (We are retiring HEAT), Configuration Management and Change Management implemention this week....can keep you informed if you wish. Aim to have it up and running by Sept for Change Management and all of it by year end. Alex

[ctipton]

Hi, We are retiring Heat after 10 years. We have purchased incident, change, problem and release and are going to be purchasing inventory. We are trying to go live with incident and inventory in a month and continue to work on our processes for change, problem and release.

[c22mom]

Is anyone out there that is already using itsm? we were in the process of migrating to ITSM and retiring Heat. we encountered some issues with incident management such as being able to close incidents that still had open assignments. at one point we could not enter zero (0) but that was fixed. the most critical issue we had was customer profiles were being deleted from customer table.

[Guest]

While I have not purhased ITSM I am looking at it, Remedy, HEAT as well as assyst by Axios Systems for what will eventually be a company wide solution (less our financial and hr depts).

What is it about HEAT that is prompting the switch to ITSM? I am very keen on HEAT but I suspect, like any software, has its drawbacks. Can any of you shed some light on why you are looking to move to ITSM?

[Leif]

[marlisafazio]

We purchased the modules, Change, Release, and Problem and planned to latch it onto a HEAT system because we thought this was the only way the modules could be used. After we had in-house training on ITSM modules we learned we didn't need HEAT any longer and adding it to HEAT is not a suggested practice. (we knew this after spending 4 months of trying to make them work together).

My advice is plan to spend a long time for full implementation if you are doing it without a skilled module resource. Maybe a year or longer. Start with Incident Management and then add the others once fully developed if you can't wait to put some call logging into place. I assume you could quickly install all the modules and make them work in production but you risk never fully developing the processes to get full benefit from the software since it is now all in production.

If you are not using HEAT to log calls you'll need the Incident Mgmt module in addition to Change, Release, Config and Problem. There are several others like Knowledge Base, Service Desk but we have opted to build our own KB and try to manage the SD function without needing special software. Because they are modular you can add something if you find you need it later.

[ShhVance]

I was part of an onsite visit from a HEAT partner this week. They presented HEAT and ITSM. One thing that came from that demo was the strong impression that FrontRange is putting a lot of effort into ITSM in favour of HEAT (just look at the GUI differences for starters).

Advantages of ITSM:
-seems to be the new focus of FrontRange
-stores incidents, problems and change tickets as separate entities. HEAT lumps them in one table
-ITSM allows for multiple 'details' tabs where as HEAT is limited to 1. A common drawback of HEAT.

If we were to choose HEAT vs ITSM and price and EOL were issues, I think we would go with ITSM. We certainly don't want t implement incident, problem and change in HEAT theh turn around in a year or even two and take a migration path to ITSM.

We're also looking at Remedy's Customer Support and Axios Systems, assyst. I have seen Remedy from incident managemen pov but have never seen assyst. Any comments you all may have on those two are of course appreciated.

[mgy]

We are evaluating the Change and Configuration Management components of ITSM. Have been told that their business object interface is a means to build relationships that are not provided out-of-the-box. Was wondering if anyone has had any experience building relationships with this tool and what kind of effort is involved. We want to build customer to business application to infrastructure types of relationships so when we have a CI that is being changed we can do the impact analysis on what parts of the business will be affected and who should we contact. I'm concerned about the effort it might take to build these types of relationships. Anyone with experience out there?

[ShhVance]

[quote]We are evaluating the Change and Configuration Management components of ITSM. ... We want to build customer to business application to infrastructure types of relationships so when we have a CI that is being changed we can do the impact analysis on what parts of the business will be affected and who should we contact. I'm concerned about the effort it might take to build these types of relationships. Anyone with experience out there?[/quote]

You may also want to consider evaluating assyst by Axios Systems. I believe they provide out of the box impact analysys on CI's.

[AJ]

Hello,
Does anyone have any experience with adding on HEAT ITSM modules: Inventory Mgmt, Incident Mgmt, Release Mgmt?? I need costing so I can put it in the budget (which of course is due ASAP, with no warning). I'm going to upgrade from 7.x to the latest version of HEAT as well (8.0.x). PLEASE PROVIDE ANY INFO POSSIBLE.

Thanks,
AJ