back to article You can keep your old ERP system, but you'll still need ServiceNow, CEO tells The Reg

In a month that has seen nearly a fifth wiped from his company's share price, Bill McDermott is remarkably cheerful. "I see growth everywhere," ServiceNow's CEO tells The Register. For context, it is not just ServiceNow that is getting a rocky ride. Some estimates suggest Big Tech stock has lost $1 trillion in value in the …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SNOW Sucks

    at the ground level it makes life a LOT harder for those of us who actually do the job.

    Encourages the dumbing down of IT (or whatever services are being used) & takes 10 minute jobs and makes you spend 1/2 the day filling out forms in SNOW to close a ticket.

    In a multi vendor environment, all that happens is that vendors push tickets around in circles to meet their SLAs without actually fixing the problems.

    Literally makes me puke!

    1. FBee

      Re: SNOW Sucks

      SNow takes a breezy shoulder-tap request - from a customer to a tech - and turns it into an immense hurricane of emails/forwardings/incidences/work orders/work order tasks and dog knows what else involving a dozen or more individuals throughout multiple continents and time zones. Back in the Goodle Days, there would have been a single filled-out ticket sheet which was then stabbed onto a check spindle, fini!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SNOW Sucks

      As a ServiceNow dev coming from a service desk background I can tell you the out of the box solution is like that. But you CAN customise it to be better. Problem is most companies/managers are clueless to the day to day issues their crazy forms and rules create. I have battled hard in every organisation to simplify things and make it logical.

      So in summary - the product and technology aren’t generally bad, but most implementations are.

      Though I will say ServiceNow’s desire to meet all the needs of a business leads them to introducing new products/modules when they’re barely pst aloha stage. Which does piss me off.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: SNOW Sucks

        That should have said “past alpha stage”. Though aloha stage sounds far more relaxing…

      2. Auntie Dix
        Big Brother

        SNOW = Giant Turd

        ServiceNow is a giant-turd product...

        ...with obscured, expensive base and add-on (thought that was included, didn't you!) pricing.

        NO ONE configures the giant turd properly, but blaming purchasers wears thin, when you know they will fail to do so because of your turd's obtuse logic and its exorbitant, ongoing consultation-for-configuration fees.

        Inept IT "decision makers" (look for the idiots' self-aggrandizing "ITIL" and "Six Sigma" mentions in their e-mail signatures) buy the hype and ticked feature boxes, with no appreciation of the never-ending nightmare costs of SNOW's endless configuration, updates, and maintenance, let alone the suffering that it inflicts on both techs and those they support.

        The turd purchasers do not care, though. It's others' money.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: SNOW = Giant Turd

          You're absolutely right. The costs spiral. I know of at least one former client who abandoned all our hard work and switched to Jira.

          ServiceNow has kept my lights on for half a decade now. But I have fallen out of love with the product. I just need another year of the gravy train and I can switch my focus somewhere else.

          IMO ServiceNow won't last. Ultimately it's just a bunch of forms on top of some workflows on top of a database. If I wanted basic ITSM and CMDB functionality I'd look at other products. That cost much less.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: SNOW Sucks

      Or as I prefer to call it "ServiceNot".

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    He seems to be channelling David Byrne

  3. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Devil

    Oracle and SAP are investing in their future...

    ...while SNow does nothing innovative and the CEO broadcasts how good he feels about that. Well, that worked out for Intel...

    Right...

    Right...?

    Right...!?

  4. Dwarf

    Why

    Why is it called ServiceNow, when you generally have to wait a very long time for things to percolate through the system and you also have to chase up people to do their bit so that things can progress on slowly to their next step.

    They should rename it to ServiceSometime as that reflects the actual experience for most of its users.

    1. Steve McIntyre

      Re: Why

      ServiceNever was the obvious name that it acqured at my last company...

    2. Dave@Home

      Re: Why

      That's a process problem, rather than a software issue.

      Whoever setup the workflow has made it need too many touchpoints, and people being people will get to it when they feel like.

  5. TonyJewell
    FAIL

    SNOW? Don't remind me.

    My heart sank every time i had to use SNOW to raise a ticket or make a change request. Laborious, tortuous and appalling UI.

    And all run on external servers with all that implies.

    It was the worst thing about my role as developer in a large financial organisation.

    There are far better self hosted solutions out there that allow you to focus more on the process rather than fighting with the SW that manages the process.

  6. Franco

    At my last contract the most challenging thing I had to do was figure out how to log a change request in ServiceNow. It was (to use the highest tier of difficulty from Carmageddon) harder than french kissing a cobra.

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