In early 2021, Cherwell users woke up to a surprise: Cherwell’s Service Manager solution was acquired by Ivanti.
As time has passed, it seems that Ivanti is no longer investing time and resources into ensuring the Cherwell platform stays up to date to address changing customer needs and with the latest features. For Cherwell customers, this means that they have to stick with Cherwell as it falls further behind the competition, migrate to Ivanti, or another ITSM platform.
While a migration can represent a major investment in time and resources, not to mention a massive headache, there are few users that want to be left dealing with legacy software. And while the future of Cherwell seems uncertain, what is certain is this: the situation isn’t going to get any better. While there has been no announcement of the product being sunsetted, it’s better to be prepared with options than to be left with no choice.
At this point, even satisfied Cherwell customers need to evaluate their current technology, tools, and requirements to understand what they should look for as they consider their future. It may make sense to explore a best-in-class approach that integrates leading solutions together, including:
- An alternative ITSM solution
- IT automation to complement and complete your ITSM platform
- Discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) to understand your device, apps, and network landscape
- An event management platform
While migrating to Ivanti is a natural choice, should a Cherwell user want to look beyond Ivanti there are dozens of other ITSM solutions on the market, such as ZenDesk, EasyVista, Micro Focus and Freshdesk. Each is going to have its strengths and weaknesses.
Before exploring your options, it will be important to measure your current Cherwell usage to understand your business needs now and anticipate what you’ll need in the future so you can find a solution that can grow with you. Migrating to an underpowered solution that you’ll quickly outgrow is not a situation you want to be in, nor is getting an overpowered solution that requires you to spend more on a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles.
Once you have an ITSM platform selected, you can augment it with an IT automation solution like Resolve. This allows you to automate service management processes and workflows so that software takes care of common tasks like onboarding and offboarding processes, password resets, enabling service availability, remediating low disk space, and enabling application self-healing.
Because Resolve has pre-built integrations with almost every ITSM platform on the market, including Cherwell and Ivanti, you can automate many of your workflows in Cherwell now and then seamlessly switch your automations over to Ivanti or your chosen ITSM when you’re ready. This will help you maximize your use of Cherwell in the short term while helping you achieve faster ROI on the new ITSM once it is up and running.
If you do choose to replace Cherwell, an automated DDM tool can also help you maximize your use of your new ITSM. An automated DDM solution will automatically map your compute, network, and storage entities, along with all its dependencies, across your hybrid IT environment.
By creating a complete map and understanding the relationships and dependencies between each entity, you’ll be able to keep your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) always updated as a single source of truth for all your IT device inventory and the relationships between those devices.
Here again Resolve can help: not only do we offer a best-in-class solution for auto-discovery, but bidirectional connectors push discovery and dependency data in near real-time to your chosen ITSM platform, ensuring that any service management action taken is utilizing the freshest data possible. Resolve can also integrate with your event management platform to ensure that tickets triggered by your ITSM tool are accurately assessed, diagnosed, and repaired.
This is an important point to reiterate: automation is the secret sauce to helping you accomplish more. Not only should you consider a best-in-class automation solution, but it's important to ensure the technology can completely and easily integrate with all the other systems in your ecosystem, creating a rising tide of efficiency and productivity that raises all boats.
This means that taking the obvious route—migrating fully to Ivanti—may not always be the best solution. An independent, system-agnostic automation solution like Resolve gives you confidence knowing that you’ll be able to seamlessly connect all your solutions together no matter what.
