Service-now.commentary

HP Extends Life Support for Service Desk Customers

Yesterday HP sent a note to their Service Desk customer base extending the Service Desk end of support date by two years. In a nutshell the letter said that HP will “extend the end of support date of Service Desk 4.5 and 5.1 by two years, to December 31, 2012.” It also tells Service Desk customers that they will now have “more time to stabilize their businesses and IT so that they can realize the greatest return on investment when they transition to Service Manager.”

We don’t think it is HP’s place to ask customers to “stabilize their business” after HP pulled the plug on a critical business application. Unfortunately customers have grown used to this type of behavior from their legacy software vendors.

From our perspective there are two main reasons why HP has extended the end of support date for Service Desk:

1. HP has had little, if any, traction in moving HP OV SD customers to HP Service Manager.
2. Extending Service Desk support allows HP to continue to capture maintenance revenues for two more years. It is better for them to capture support revenues than lose a customer altogether (although customer attrition is happening now and is inevitable in the future).

Frankly, HP customers have no compelling reason to move from really old technology to really, really old technology. A brief history lesson. The HP OpenView Service Desk was originally developed in the early ‘90s by Prolin Technologies. Prolin was acquired by HP and subsequently renamed HP OpenView Service Desk. Under their watch, HP has virtually abandoned development of Service Desk and has only produced a single release (version 5.1). Version 5.1 is notoriously unstable. A majority of Service Desk customers are using version 4.5 which has not been updated in more than five years.

In 2005 HP acquired Peregrine Systems and ServiceCenter which used to be a market-share leading service desk technology. Given the development and support burden associated with owning and managing two service desk technologies, HP selected Peregrine ServiceCenter as their go-forward service desk technology, essentially abandoning Service Desk customers. Peregrine ServiceCenter was later renamed HP Service Manager.

HP’s “migration” path to Service Manager will be nothing short of a complete reimplementation that will take months or years.

Customers do not see the value in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to move to another legacy technology. At the core there are several reasons why a customer would not elect to move to HP Service Manager:

• HP Service Manager is Peregrine ServiceCenter, technology built in 1981.
• Moving to HP Service Manager is a complete reimplementation – customers would be starting from scratch.
• The migration cost will be outrageous, with costs potentially exceeding $1 million.
• Migration is an extreme disruption to customer business with little additive value.
• Additional licensing costs.
• Retraining of all service desk and IT operations staff.
• Process reengineering to align the people with the forced out-of-box processes.

We have a proven track record of migrating HP Service Desk customers to Service-now.com in as little as twelve weeks. Service-now.com customers are very satisfied with their decision to move away from HP.

In October, Service-now.com delivered a Virtual Conference dedicated to answering the question “how do I mitigate risks associated with end-of-life scenarios?” The compelling content from this Virtual Conference is now available as an online resource center complete with customer case studies, TCO comparisons and industry analyst best practices for HP customers looking to turn this unfortunate end-of-life scenario into an opportunity.