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ITOM Technical Preview


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The Technical Preview of Hornbill ITOM has now ended.

Question and Answers

  1. With the Inventory Discovery is there a away to include this in the asset list in Service Manager and then to link to 'last logged in user' if this user is a customer in Service Manager?
    Not at the moment this integration is coming soon though.
     
  2. Will it be possible to add discovered items to an inventory group automatically based on OS or some other attribute?
    Not currently, we are reviewing the requirement internally. 
     
  3. What OS’s does it support under “Target OS”?
    Currently Windows 32bit / Windows 64bit / Windows Generic. Linux/Unix and Mac OS coming soon.
     
  4. Does it work with Linux OS's?
    As above, coming soon.
     
  5. Can the discovered equipment be automatically added to groups, rather than the manual clicking method, we have over 4000 machines and we don't want to be moving things manually 
    Being investigated internally at the moment, potentially adding dynamic lists.
     
  6. What does the underlying discovery please, is it agentless ?
    100% Agentless.
     
  7. Can these packages etc be run from a request in Service Manager via the BPM?
    Yes, shown towards the end of the Technical Demo.
     
  8. What device types can you discover? eg can it discover switches/routers & Linux/Unix?
    IP Port Scanning coming soon along with SNMP, currently only windows machines can be discovered. 
     
  9. Is there a vision to extend the capabilities of what is discovered on a machine, not just installed products? E.g. websites on a server, databases on a RDBMS server?
    Not currently, investigating internally for the long term roadmap of Hornbill ITOM. 

  10. Does the discovery add to the asset management module?
    Not currently, being working on as part of the Service Manager integration.
     
  11. Any plans to add the capability to use snmp for device discovery/querying?
    Yes.
     
  12. Will you offer any "pre-built" packages similar to what PDQ offer?
    Yes, please tell us what packages you want to see and we will look to add them.
     
  13. Is there support for redundancy/failover?
    For Site Integration Servers yes, multiple servers will serve the job queue if one is unavailable the others can pick up the jobs in the queue. A Job can be targeted to a single SIS Server or a Group of SIS Servers.
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@Gerry Hard for you to answer at this stage I would imagine but I will ask it nevertheless. The pricing seems to lean towards managed assets IE computers/laptops that are discovered that you then wish to have the ability to automate tasks to however, if we aim to use SCCM or Intune for this element of ITOM but are still interested in user based ITOM integrations how does the pricing work?  For example AD User & Group management, creating users and adding to groups, does this mirror the cost of the asset model whereby subscriptions are based on AD user count much like the asset count? 

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@Stephen.whittle

Thanks for the question, its a good one!  You are right, having looked at all of the other enterprise type ITOM solutions they are generally based on per-asset pricing, that seems to be the way it works.  So, setting aside our existing customers for one second, one of the biggest challenges with pricing is how we enable people who wish to select a product to buy, to compere apples with apples - hence the per-asset pricing.  However, we also recognise that some people will just want to manage things like AD accounts, so arguably would only need to "manage" a couple of computers (their AD servers), and in this case we could not justify the on going development of such an initiative for our customers if we could only monazite £2/month. Clearly therefore we have a pricing conundrum and it is something we are researching now, but in recognition of this and in the spirit of moving things forwards for our existing customers, I went with the sample per computer/month model, but set a minimum level of 1000 assets,  that was a back-stop position rather than the final pricing strategy.  

So I am not entirely sure I have a good answer at this point, but I am interested in any thoughts. 

Gerry

 

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@Gerry just my 2 pence;

PDQ charges per administrator rather than per device. So for PDQ inventory admin costs say £500 per year. The licence for PDQ deploy also costs £500 per year. 

You cant use deploy without inventory and inventory usefulness is limited without deploy so we bought licences for 5 admins for both, plus 5 inventory only licences for audits and other stuff.

We looked at other stuff that was £x per device/per month but it always seemed to be a pain to manage.

Obviously PDQ dont do everything ITOM does and we cant use BPMs and all rest of it but for deploying software/scripts either manually/via powershell script/schedule/mdt it works well for us (so far).

Hoping to replace the whole lot with ITOM though :) 

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@Dan Munns

Yeah we looked at PDQ the other day, its not really something we are trying to compete with, we are pitching more towards the Ivanti/BMC/Servicenow end of the ITOM automation space.  PDQ is an interesting looking product, they also have a free version which I presume is good enough to evaluate with, and an enterprise version, which I assume the per-server pricing would be an equivalent to our SIS server. Its a bit hard to compare them like for like though as I say, because we built ITOM on Hornbill to ultimately do a different job. Thanks for the pointer, its on our list to review internally.

Gerry

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@Gerry

Thanks for coming back so quickly. I completely understand the position and that this needs to make sense commercially as well given the time invested but equally as a consumer I need to ensure the offering has ROI rather than just "Nice to haves" to justify in a business case. I think some form of multi-level pricing would work well so consumers can pick and choose the functions they wish to use. 

We have a very large user and asset base so with that in mind would always be a very expensive solution for our organisation and very little appetite for uptake as a result. 

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40 minutes ago, Stephen.whittle said:

@Gerry

Thanks for coming back so quickly. I completely understand the position and that this needs to make sense commercially as well given the time invested but equally as a consumer I need to ensure the offering has ROI rather than just "Nice to haves" to justify in a business case. I think some form of multi-level pricing would work well so consumers can pick and choose the functions they wish to use. 

We have a very large user and asset base so with that in mind would always be a very expensive solution for our organisation and very little appetite for uptake as a result. 

Indeed, this was my first observation, lots of customers have large estates and may not want to use ITOM for managing those devices, the most common use-case would seem to be to automate account management on AD etc, the challenge there is the range or organisation size, finding the right pricing model is important if Hornbill is to commit to driving this capability through.  It seems that my initial thought of only making ITOM available as part of our Enterprise offering might well be the way to go, as thats where we really had in mind from a market positioning point of view. Obviously, we have more work and research to do. 

Gerry

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, Gerry said:

It seems that my initial thought of only making ITOM available as part of our Enterprise offering might well be the way to go

I think that would count us out then.

Last time I got a quote for us to move to Enterprise it almost (if not actually) doubled our subscription and I got a flat 'No' from the bosses.

Hopefully you get come up with a model for both but if not then sadly I think we will have to give it a miss. :( 

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@Dan Munns

I had previously stated in the presentation, that although making ITOM part of our Enterprise offering was a consideration, it would not apply to existing customers, I want to find a way of putting this in the hands of our existing customers, but I am also trying to find a commercial model that works for future customers.  I was hoping I could keep the commercials simple, but its already apparent that there are lots of variations so I need to map out what those are, the more feedback and the more I get on this subject from existing customers the more information I have to hand, so I would encourage you not to rule anything out just yet. 

Gerry

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@Gerry nothing is being ruled out by me.

I have a few cards up my sleeve for showing ROI (within reason lol).

I must have missed that part of the presentation (I was doing other things whilst/listening I am afraid).

I get the feeling that your commercials will end up like this:

image.png.73f5fb47b98e43b113d56d345456bfea.png

where as customers will be more like this: 

image.png.22c38f521bc2e6e30031246f9ea3c188.png

I don't envy the task.

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Lol indeed!  I am very keen on making sure existing customers get the benefit of the ITOM initiative, a lot of work has gone in, and there is a lot more work to go in yet, and I am convinced there are a lot of opportunities for IT to move up the maturity ladder, with this stuff.   The commercial model is always tough, for ITOM at Hornbill its new people, new skills and ultimately a whole new layer to our support infrastructure, thats why I ultimately need to get the commercial model right.  We are learning right now...

Hopefully, once you got past your local windows firewall stuff, you found the SIS deployment and pairing process simple... thats what I am trying to drive, getting this stuff a simple as possible, I would like to see things like account management in the hands of business people and remove the esoteric complexities from the day to day work that needs to get done. 

Gerry

 

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Yeah the pairing process is super simple to be fair. 

I just need to look into which of the firewalls is blocking the traffic tomorrow.

And I need to work out the discovery tool next. Had a couple of failed attempts today but I know at least some where because the SIS was down. 

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Hi Dan,

Superb, good to know.  We have tried to make the deployment and pairing as simple as possible, but we are well aware there are lots of security measures out in customer environments, so its interesting to see what issues we face. Good to know its all sorted for you.

Gerry 

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 12/4/2019 at 4:20 PM, Gerry said:

@Stephen.whittle

Thanks for the question, its a good one!  You are right, having looked at all of the other enterprise type ITOM solutions they are generally based on per-asset pricing, that seems to be the way it works.  So, setting aside our existing customers for one second, one of the biggest challenges with pricing is how we enable people who wish to select a product to buy, to compere apples with apples - hence the per-asset pricing.  However, we also recognise that some people will just want to manage things like AD accounts, so arguably would only need to "manage" a couple of computers (their AD servers), and in this case we could not justify the on going development of such an initiative for our customers if we could only monazite £2/month. Clearly therefore we have a pricing conundrum and it is something we are researching now, but in recognition of this and in the spirit of moving things forwards for our existing customers, I went with the sample per computer/month model, but set a minimum level of 1000 assets,  that was a back-stop position rather than the final pricing strategy.  

So I am not entirely sure I have a good answer at this point, but I am interested in any thoughts. 

Gerry

 

Hi Gerry

Our situation is similar to @Stephen.whittle We manage assets through SCCM and Intune, but would be using ITOM for User and Group management so the pricing model would not necessarily apply. However, if there was a set cost similar to the iBridge model, then that would work for us. Interesting to see where you head with this because it's part of our planning and considerations

Thanks

Darren 

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@Darren Rose @Stephen.whittle

Gents, thanks for your feedback.  Yes a few people have said a similar thing so we are looking at offering different tiers, the most basic one giving you the ability to manage AD accounts using pre-packaged content as this seems to be a common requirement, similar conceptually to iBridge but behind the firewall.  Will communicate further once we have something down on paper. 

Gerry

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  • 3 months later...
Guest Paul Alexander

Hi @Gerry

We're finally getting to a stage where we can now start looking at ITOM services, and I was wondering if anything concrete has been decided on pricing please? We'll only be using it initially to manage AD accounts etc behind the firewall.

thanks...oh, and Happy New Year! :D

 

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  • 1 month later...
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