Of all the shitty enterprise software vendors, there is no platform I hate more than ServiceNow.
What an abomination of something seemingly so simple made into something so horrendously complex and bloated.
I was trying to explain to some new ServiceNow AE why we wouldn't be buying more product from them. Literally everyone who uses the product hates it - developers, admins, end users.
It behaves like it is constantly broken.
People talk shit about it all day, every day.
Maybe one day, some time a long time ago they had a good product, and that's how it got embedded all over the place, but now, what a pile of junk!
You should have seen the platform it replaced. ServiceNow was essentially "let's rewrite HP Service Manager from scratch to remove the legacy debt." Service Manager was what you get when you develop a mainframe green screen application using a low-code RAD system and then try to maintain it for 20 years.
Amusingly, I'm consulting with a company now whose business model and product strategy is "a rewrite of Service Manager that's cheaper and more sane." Presumably the cycle of rewriting these kinds of platforms will continue until the heat death of the universe.
I think all that generally applies to enterprise software like that, no? SAP is absolute garbage but it ticks various C-level agenda items (mainly the act itself of investing in ERP modernization) and so it sells regardless. Servicenow I belive makes it harder for employees to get help and thus saves labor. Enterprise software isn't for you or me, that's why we hate it.
I couldn't agree more. But as others have said, it did replace some awful late 90s, early 2000s, software.
What's funny is that my dayjob became a re-seller for ServiceNow, and our ServiceNow install is terribly slow.
Then we have a major government client that we tried to sell ServiceNow to, but they decided on another re-seller. And I still have to work with this client as a consultant so I have to login to their separate ServiceNow setup, and wow is it faster! That other vendor that won the contract over us sure did a much better job at the setup than we ever did. (I was not involved in the re-selling or setup of ServiceNow at my dayjob, I only work in it as a user)
I think you have a skewed perception of value add. ServiceNow conquered the software as a service industry like no other and will be around for decades to come.
Developers and Admins may not like it because its development with bumpers for kids. End users dislike it because of the developers and admins. There may be some worth looking in the mirror to be had before you point the finger at a software platform for short comings within the organization.
Enterprises want software that they can bend to conform to their entrenched, arcane business processes. But no two enterprises are alike. And meeting the needs of the lowest common denominator doesn't sell units.
So you risk falling into the trap of trying to do everything for everyone but doing nothing well.
You can only stuff so much shit into a cornucopia before it becomes more of a garbage bin.
>> Of all the shitty enterprise software vendors, there is no platform I hate more than ServiceNow.
Forget about their enterprise software, the very premise of the function they support is the thing I hate most. The software, the company, the consultants who push this garbage, the employees within your company who somehow have a named role implementing and managing it, I loathe it all.
ServiceNow was the better alternative all round -- as compared to Remedy and HP Service Center.
The customizations and integrations, api, cloud were decent.
The licensing was bad. The pressure to "upgrade" to latest version every year (or lose support) was insane.
Sales was aggressive.
A couple of trends probably pushed this into a hated category --
Orgs had to customize the hell out of every workflow instead of keeping it simple and following standard ITIL.
The moment you veered away from "out of the box" features and did customizations ..your yearly upgrades risked failing.
The people in Orgs who maintain and customize the tool needed to be decently skilled. Cheapest body shop vendor doesn't cut it.
ServiceNow certifications were good initially then they became expensive/unaffordable, too many, too much to keep current.
ServiceNow themselves brought into many new features like AI, chatbots, RPA etc that it all became a huge complex beast. Basic features of a ticketing tool probably became too complex to maintain?
I worked there for exactly two months. After 15 days, I could not receive another offer and put in my notice fast enough. Ended up giving them four days. And I'm usually very careful about not burning bridges.
Can you elaborate? A customer is in the process of implementing (Tokyo version?) it and it seems to have an intuitive, responsive UI. I'm judging it against Atlassian and Oracle EBS so I have low expectations.
I was at IBM for several years, can agree that ServiceNow is a steaming pile, like most of IBM. I spent the majority of my time fighting tooling over actually helping customers, lol.
Something I've been mulling over for a while: security vulnerabilities are basically the original developers getting outsmarted, caught out being careless. Even a very skilled, careful team might ship bugs that have security implications. But low-skilled, careless teams are definitely doing this. All buggy software is also vulnerable. There is no such thing as low-quality but secure.
Any user can query pretty much any table in the DB using their "GQL" wrapper around SQL. Someone thought enough to restrict the "user_password" field, so instead you query another table which gives you the user's session ID. Normally a token is user session ID + signature. But it turns out the signature wasn't really being validated, so user session ID + anything worked.
I'm normally not one to jump on mistakes, but that's remarkably bad.
It can really depend on the nature of the vulnerability and who discovered it. Based on the timeline at the bottom of this article it seems like this was way too slow. Based on the cve information this was ranked as 9.8. The last time I dealt with a bug that bad it was log4j. It was found on a Tuesday, patched on a Thursday, announced on a Friday, and I redeployed all of our servers over the weekend.
The most egregious part in my eyes is the slow response to the initial contact. In shows that Service Now does not monitor it's reporting and that they don't care about security. If I were using a product of theirs to handle proprietary or privileged information I would no longer trust them.
My experience with this sort of enterprise software is that if you are a user, there is usually someone higher up the org chart than you that is worried such a disclosure will damage his relationship with his mate. My point being, much like Oracle, the usual timeline is that you never go public.
No, judging from the Disclosure Timeline at the very bottom, it appears the lengthy remediation is due to ServiceNow dragging their feet. Took them over a month, plus a followup email, just to get them to respond to the initial report.
ServiceNow ships major upgrades twice a year and patches every month. It means that they could genuinely not figure out how to remediate this quickly and quietly without disrupting ongoing contract negotiations. It means that even with that, they couldn't fix it for a whole year.
They negotiate multiyear contracts. they're investing into government and healthcare services.
Ah, ServiceNow. We had to hold a formal code review on the steaming pile of turd they delivered because it was so incredibly bad even testing it would have been a security risk. That's the quality you get from them.
Eh, Remedy has lots of issues but I'd take it over "SNow" any day - at least it's easy to build CLI tools or API calls into Remedy. I'm neither an admin or user of either, just an end user.
chevman|2 years ago
What an abomination of something seemingly so simple made into something so horrendously complex and bloated.
I was trying to explain to some new ServiceNow AE why we wouldn't be buying more product from them. Literally everyone who uses the product hates it - developers, admins, end users.
It behaves like it is constantly broken.
People talk shit about it all day, every day.
Maybe one day, some time a long time ago they had a good product, and that's how it got embedded all over the place, but now, what a pile of junk!
solresol|2 years ago
Amusingly, I'm consulting with a company now whose business model and product strategy is "a rewrite of Service Manager that's cheaper and more sane." Presumably the cycle of rewriting these kinds of platforms will continue until the heat death of the universe.
version_five|2 years ago
INTPenis|2 years ago
What's funny is that my dayjob became a re-seller for ServiceNow, and our ServiceNow install is terribly slow.
Then we have a major government client that we tried to sell ServiceNow to, but they decided on another re-seller. And I still have to work with this client as a consultant so I have to login to their separate ServiceNow setup, and wow is it faster! That other vendor that won the contract over us sure did a much better job at the setup than we ever did. (I was not involved in the re-selling or setup of ServiceNow at my dayjob, I only work in it as a user)
maximinus_thrax|2 years ago
In my two-decade long career, I don't think I ever heard about any enterprise software for which that statement is false.
notyourwork|2 years ago
Developers and Admins may not like it because its development with bumpers for kids. End users dislike it because of the developers and admins. There may be some worth looking in the mirror to be had before you point the finger at a software platform for short comings within the organization.
runlevel1|2 years ago
So you risk falling into the trap of trying to do everything for everyone but doing nothing well.
You can only stuff so much shit into a cornucopia before it becomes more of a garbage bin.
wintogreen74|2 years ago
Forget about their enterprise software, the very premise of the function they support is the thing I hate most. The software, the company, the consultants who push this garbage, the employees within your company who somehow have a named role implementing and managing it, I loathe it all.
albert_e|2 years ago
ServiceNow was the better alternative all round -- as compared to Remedy and HP Service Center.
The customizations and integrations, api, cloud were decent.
The licensing was bad. The pressure to "upgrade" to latest version every year (or lose support) was insane.
Sales was aggressive.
A couple of trends probably pushed this into a hated category --
Orgs had to customize the hell out of every workflow instead of keeping it simple and following standard ITIL.
The moment you veered away from "out of the box" features and did customizations ..your yearly upgrades risked failing.
The people in Orgs who maintain and customize the tool needed to be decently skilled. Cheapest body shop vendor doesn't cut it.
ServiceNow certifications were good initially then they became expensive/unaffordable, too many, too much to keep current.
ServiceNow themselves brought into many new features like AI, chatbots, RPA etc that it all became a huge complex beast. Basic features of a ticketing tool probably became too complex to maintain?
clivestaples|2 years ago
jcims|2 years ago
Their cloud CMDB offerings are horrendous, and in my experience get bought before anyone gets a chance to let the blood out.
wharfjumper|2 years ago
zorrobyte|2 years ago
NikolaNovak|2 years ago
We are likely to get it next year . I feel it cannot be worse than the aberration we are currently using but I could be wrong :-/
closeparen|2 years ago
robertlagrant|2 years ago
miguelazo|2 years ago
There are far worse products in the same space than ServiceNow.
Edit: glad to see someone else already mentioned SAP.
SteveNuts|2 years ago
aiisjustanif|2 years ago
JimmyRuska|2 years ago
ChatGTP|2 years ago
rzimmerman|2 years ago
Any user can query pretty much any table in the DB using their "GQL" wrapper around SQL. Someone thought enough to restrict the "user_password" field, so instead you query another table which gives you the user's session ID. Normally a token is user session ID + signature. But it turns out the signature wasn't really being validated, so user session ID + anything worked.
I'm normally not one to jump on mistakes, but that's remarkably bad.
frakt0x90|2 years ago
6D794163636F756|2 years ago
The most egregious part in my eyes is the slow response to the initial contact. In shows that Service Now does not monitor it's reporting and that they don't care about security. If I were using a product of theirs to handle proprietary or privileged information I would no longer trust them.
technion|2 years ago
stigz|2 years ago
genmud|2 years ago
manvillej|2 years ago
They negotiate multiyear contracts. they're investing into government and healthcare services.
pmlnr|2 years ago
mschuster91|2 years ago
Ticket systems are always a giant pain.
dvorak_typist|2 years ago
RCE as admin has been a problem for over a decade. _Globally_ sessions do not expire... This is just the tip of the shit architecture iceberg.
pm2222|2 years ago
Sylamore|2 years ago
doctaj|2 years ago
miguelazo|2 years ago