necrobobsledder posted:

Anyone have a cheaper alternative to suggest than Zendesk for end-user support centric ticketing? I'm trying to bootstrap a start-up and can't afford much but do need some form of customer support that doesn't look ghetto.


ITIL service desk anything that even bats an eye at the term CMDB is the primary difference between a $500 ticketing system and a $50M+ one like what we have (just in licensing costs alone, probably another order of magnitude more in just plain labor costs to maintain the horrific "integrations" developed that I swear have bikini pricing - exponentially increasing price the less material you get).

Any enterprise ticketing system like HP Service Manager, BMC Remedy, or Service Now will be insanely expensive and require so many POCs for basic stuff it's not even funny.

I would generally lean toward "the database schema / API integration mechanics are so bad + whoever designed the ITSM specs and workflows are probably mentally handicapped that even if you assigned Jeff Dean to come up with an implementation and working design it would be terrible" as the answer when it comes to "why is my enterprise IT ticketing so bad?" I think I've worked on at least 200 ITSM POCs very few of which I thought were ok, don't shoot me
That's EM7 you're talking about, right? The place I just quit was trying to sell this for infrastructure monitoring outside of the cloud house, which is already a tough pill to swallow considering how many possible monitoring tools could be even attepted. I did a rough count and saw about... 45 monitoring solutions that were deployed into production. Absolutely none of them were paid less than $100k I'm pretty sure. This place burns money on bad software constantly and pays people dick thinking that buying technology (none of the kind that doesn't come with a sales engineer and account rep attached by default) will lead to IT nirvana.