Well, it finally happened. After almost 3 years after the acquisition of Cherwell by Ivanti, they announced an official End-of-Life (EOL) date for Cherwell CSM.
This closely follows the EOL date for Cherwell CAM. With that announcement, we weren’t surprised. Cherwell CAM had a very limited use case (On-premises Software Asset Management) and wasn’t very widely used by the Cherwell userbase. In addition, Ivanti has far superior products in the Asset Management space than CAM, so transitioning customers to Ivanti Asset Management (formerly LanDesk) from CAM was a no-brainer.
Announcing an official EOL for Cherwell CSM, however, was a shocker. We had heard some rumblings that it might happen, but Ivanti had been assuring Cherwell customers from the beginning that Cherwell would be support until the last Cherwell customer left the product (!), so we were quite surprised to see this announcement today (10/31/2023).
When we became Cherwell partners in 2012, we were excited. The product was solid and had recently introduced more ITIL processes and we felt like we could have very successful implementations with the software and make many customers happy. And we did! Cherwell was/is very powerful, allowing us to create custom modules very quickly and allowing us to write workflows and integrations that helped companies become much more efficient.
However, Cherwell was never able to make the jump to a SaaS platform successfully. While we (StrataCom) were writing add-ons for Cherwell like a Native Mobile client and Kanban boards that ran on a SaaS platform that was truly multi-tenant, Cherwell developers never made the changes necessary to support a SaaS platform, miring the company in a very expensive hosting predicament.
A little over a year ago, we (StrataCom) decided to look for another ITSM software vendor. We didn’t feel like Ivanti had a tight focus on the ITSM market and their Neurons platform had quite a way to go to match Cherwell’s functionality in many ways. So instead of creating new features that would benefit customers, Ivanti was stuck trying to marry two very old platforms (LanDesk and HEAT) together to make a single product and ALSO trying to make Neurons for ITSM on par with Cherwell’s codeless development environment.
We settled on Atlassian and their Jira Service Management platform (JSM). We had done quite a bit of integration work with Jira Software in the past and we knew a lot of our existing customers were using that platform. We knew JSM was a fairly new addition to Jira’s stable of products, but it was built on Jira Service Desk, which had been around for over a decade. JSM gave StrataCom and our customers the best chance to jump to the next level of efficiency in the ITSM realm over numerous competitors. There are a lot of ITSM software companies out there, but they mainly fall into two categories:
- Gigantic enterprise vendors that have been around for a long time and are also very expensive, hard to implement and not very innovative
- Up-and-coming ITSM software vendors that solve very niche problems for companies, but will probably disappear during the next economic downturn.
JSM had the unique combination of a very large user base (Atlassian currently has 260,000 total customers, with almost 50,000 of them using JSM) along with a very quick implementation time and a lot of expertise out there in the marketplace.
So, while we’re sad to see Cherwell, a product we’ve worked with now for almost 12 years, disappear from the marketplace, we’re very excited to work with Atlassian and implement their JSM product for companies and help them make their IT organizations work more efficiently.
Contact us to chat about this and other amazing Jira Service Management features!