In early 2021, Cherwell users woke up to a surprise: Cherwell’s Service Manager solution was acquired by Ivanti.
At the time, the acquisition made sense, as Ivanti planned to invest in both the Ivanti Neurons platform and the Cherwell solution to provide customers with an end-to-end service and asset management solution—the best of both worlds. But as time has passed, the future of Cherwell Service Manager seems unclear.
For Cherwell customers, this raises the question: stick around, or explore other solutions?
The Cherwell Conundrum
On the one hand, there is a strong case for sticking it out: Cherwell likely continues to do the job for many customers, as it has not changed since the acquisition. If the product worked then, the thinking goes, then it should probably still work now.
But that’s exactly the reason why it’s time to start exploring other options: Cherwell will stay the same, while your business continues to grow and adapt.
Common in many technology acquisitions, it appears Ivanti has focused its investments on incorporating Cherwell’s technology into its own platform, not in further developing the capabilities of the Cherwell product. As a result, the product already lacks some of the features and updates that other solutions provide. As the acquisition becomes further and further in the rear-view mirror, the gap between Cherwell and other solutions may only continue to grow.
Meanwhile, not only does your business continue to evolve, but business conditions continue to change at light speed. Almost overnight, the world has gone from the optimism of a record-high stock market to 8% inflation, a massive loss in stock market value, layoffs, and a potential recession.
In this market, your business will need to evolve faster than ever to survive, let alone get ahead. If you can out-adapt your competitors, you have the chance to capture market share and continue to grow. If you want to adapt faster than the other guys, you need the ability to leverage the latest in IT service request capabilities–something Cherwell customers can no longer confidently say they are able to access.
How to Maximize Your Cherwell Investment
If you’re a Cherwell customer, you’ve likely made a significant investment in terms of time and money. You may not be in the position to make a switch without significant effort.
In order to keep pace while you explore your options, the best step to take is to augment your Cherwell investment with complementary IT automation software. By fully automating common service management processes and workflows that Cherwell alone cannot, you can increase your IT staff efficiency by letting automation take care of important but time-consuming tasks. This frees your IT staff to focus on the tasks and workflows that automation can’t handle while extending the life of your Cherwell investment.
Here are just a few of the common IT processes that Cherwell customers can automate right now:
- Onboarding and offboarding: By automating the onboarding process, employees can automatically get access to all the tools and systems they need without having to call the service desk for support. For offboarding, automation ensures that ex-employees don’t have access to systems they shouldn’t and that customer emails are redirected appropriately, helping you maintain security and customer relationships.
- Password resets: With more company systems than ever before, users are constantly having password problems, making password reset requests one of the leading IT service issues. Automation can let your users reset passwords with a few clicks instead of waiting for IT to respond.
- Enabling service availability: If a process or system should freeze, it can be minutes or even hours before IT can respond, keeping employees from being able to work. Automation can restart a system to bring it back online faster while providing a log trail so IT staff can further investigate the issue.
- Remediating low disk space: Similarly, if someone misses that the organization is about to run out of a key storage source, it can impact everything from employee productivity to application performance. Automation can analyze storage resources to optimize where data goes, ensuring storage remains available.
- Application self-healing: While artificial intelligence can enable application self-healing, it can be expensive and difficult to implement while creating a risk of downstream impact that the AI can’t anticipate. Automation lets you create workflows that mimic the actions at the same scale and speed of application self-healing while keeping IT in control.
