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Beyond the SCSM

Christopher_CarverChristopher_Carver Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭
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My customers and clients really like the Cireson portal and I feel that it has been a great asset to continue to maintain. I am wondering if Cireson has plans for the frontend portal to move beyond that of just attaching itself to SCSM and the System Center suite? The reason I ask is roughly 50% of my automation capacity is now linking ITSM tickets between ServiceNow and SCSM. Analysts can now work ServiceNow tickets via the Cireson Portal. This coordination work is handled by SCORCH making sure tickets stay in sync. I am now integrating JIRA into the mix as well, though a bit smaller implementation. In both cases, considerable development, support, and monitoring go into this effort.

Our external vendors (AT&T/DXC/Oracle/etc. etc.) are offering ServiceNow plugins and services to directly coordinate service management activities via ServiceNow. What remains is "my customers" still prefer the Cireson interface even against the newer tooling of JIRA and ServiceNow. We are also a very heavy Azure consumer and many Azure features like Flow, Power Apps, and Automation directly ties into other ticketing solutions, yet SCSM remains a secondary citizen of the ecosystem.

I have talked with both of our Microsoft enterprise account reps that maintain an office at our location. Neither reps have any insight into the futures of SCSM other than the number of years the product is under support. Zero word on development. Thou backend of SCSM seems solid, it's showing its age with the lack of what I would call modern advancements. Namely with the managing management packs, the ways the system is patched and upgraded, and how connectors have such a heavy impact to the database during there update cycles; I deal in 100k+ AD accounts and assets. I am also under the impression that Microsoft no longer uses SCSM as it's own ticketing tool, which in itself is a telling sign if true.

Thank you for any insight you have on the matter. This will help me plan out the continued evolution of our service management ecosystem here.

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  • Christopher_CarverChristopher_Carver Customer Adept IT Monkey ✭✭
    Thank you, much appreciated. We are a multi-conglomerate and many of our external vendors use different SM solutions. I bet you can imagine the fun and hilarity that ensues when we have a three-way vendor coordination challenge for change requests. Yippy! So far we have one SCSM, two JIRA, and two ServiceNow systems we tie together under the Cireson Portal by syncing tickets with SCSM. Plus ties into the Adobe Licensing, MS Azure Licensing and smaller boutique vendors leveraging REST calls into their proprietary black holes. Oh, almost forgot. And 5 PMG iRequest systems too, that I have to integrate with by the end of the year. I'm not hoping for an all encompassing solution. Maybe just one where the community at large could follow some documentation and start creating plugins into other SM backends. 

    ITIL teaches that the idea of a single CMDB is no longer the best practice over the long haul, it's too ridgid and inflexible. (I was just tested over this and passed. #BigTimeStuff #IDriveCamry) We have adopted this line of thinking and it's my job to take multiple "the source of truth" CMDBs and become the broker of Service Management operations with roughly 6 vendors and all of the business units.

    Once again, thank you for the reply.
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