License Model Concerns - Concurrent to Named

[#1]

We have done a formal evaluation of a few Service Management tools and Service-Now was the clear winner in terms of functionality, reporting, ease of use, and ease of administering. Where we are struggling now is on the pricing and the culture change that would need to occur within our organization.

Currently a majority of IT has a user account for our incident management system. Of those accounts, there are heavy daily users (service center, process owners, core technicians), mid-level users, and then a substantial group of infrequent users that access the system less than once a week (ancillary technicians, BA's, off-shore support). Our concurrent licencing structure allows us to support this amount of users without additional overhead or concern.

My question is - How have you handled the reduction of available licenses when moving from a concurrent model to a named model? How best is the infrequent user supported? We do not want to harm our customer support or over burden certain users, but conversely we also do not want to pay a monthly fee for a user that accesses the system less than 6 - 8 times a month.

Thanks for your feedback.

[LSCS-OTS-AE]

We have the same licensing concern at our educational institution. We employ part-time desktop support personnel, who may access Service-Now 3-4 hours a day, yet we pay for a full license. One possible remedy is implementing a role-based licensing pricing model; whereas, a Service-Now administrator pays for a full license, but an occasional user is charged a reduced license fee.

[robin850]

Depending on what your different users do, perhaps they can just use email to Update, Assign, Resolve?

We have many users that are happy with just those features.

OTOH, I would like to see some further flexibility with licensing.

cheers,

robin850

[dean_schweiger]

Hi All,
We are just starting to enter these same issues with out license model. ServiceNow is an outstanding product, it is why we chose it many years ago and why we want to continue to so, however it is going to be difficult for us. As Thunter said, we too have a core number of users who are in ServiceNow everyday, and many who are infrequent or are approvers, but need to ITIL access to perform a task once every month or so. Our organisation is looking to expand Incident Management across the company and use ServiceNow as an Incident Management tool outside of the traditional IT use. Any issues, enquiries relating to sales, billing, product, legal, complaints etc that come in from our client base can be assigned to ANY department in the company, not just IT areas. I foresee the same happening across the company as we have with IT only users, there will be core users in our call centres, but other areas may only get the odd ticket each month.

Again, to do this is going to be a rather expensive exercise on the current "named" user model. We are discussing concurrent licensing options with ServiceNow, however given this thread is over 2years old I would be interested to know who you have dealt with this over the last 2yrs.

Thanks,
Dean