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It's Magic Quadrant Season

By Dion Williams
CEO & Founder, Servicely · 30+ years in enterprise ITSM
October 17, 2021

We always look forward to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools. It’s a wealth of information on where the market is at, and what emerging trends are being picked up by analysts and customer survey respondents. Some things change, other things remain mystifyingly consistent between iterations.

It's impossible to talk Gartner ITSM Magic Quadrant without discussing ServiceNow. We have a deep history with ServiceNow since before we became a product company, so we hold them in high regard and at the same time we know their limitations intimately.

The Analyst Say....

We thought we’d share a few relevant quotes from Gartner, which we hear time and time again in the market.

ServiceNow lacks the license model flexibility of many of its closest competitors…Functionality to track improvement initiatives that drive maturity requires an ITSM Professional license, which comes at a significantly higher cost than the entry-level Standard edition.

- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools 2021

Some Gartner clients are concerned that ServiceNow’s market position is hurting their ability to negotiate their contract or reduce their footprint without heavy impacts to their current discount. This is significant for organizations looking to reduce or optimize spend through downsizing their ITSM footprint in response to adverse financial impacts resulting from compulsoryCOVID-19 response measures.

-       Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools 2020

ServiceNow has restricted support to the current and previous versions of the product, which requires customers to perform an upgrade at least once every year. This can strain customers with limited resources to support their ITSM implementations… Gartner clients report that frequent changes in licensing policies and bundling make product renewals challenging.

-       Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools 2019

While new, optional features (e.g., incident categorization based upon machine learning) offer the potential for operational cost savings, the shift to usage-based pricing has the potential to increase budgeting risk due to unplanned increases in total annual spend, as feature utilization increases.

-       Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools 2018

Stricter approver licensing, named-user-only subscriptions and the bundling of noncore product features make it confusing for ServiceNow's customers to achieve favorable deals.

-       Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools 2017

Interactions with Gartner clients indicate that some organizations with low I&O maturity struggle to demonstrate sufficient value from their ServiceNow.‍

-       Gartner Magic Quadrant for Service Management Tools, Pretty Much Every Year Please note that this is not the sum total nor the overall conclusion of Gartner's coverage of ServiceNow, about whom they also say a lot of nice things. But still...

Choices

How can ServiceNow command such astronomical pricing?

It’s because there has been a lack of viable alternatives for a true workflow platform, with complete flexibility and built-in AI.

With the arrival of Servicely that has now changed…Sign up below for industry trends, analysis, blogs and product updates. Or jump straight to a demo.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally. All rights reserved.
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Monthly Ticket Volume Annual Tickets Cost at $22/ticket
500 6,000 $132,000
1,000 12,000 $264,000
2,500 30,000 $660,000
5,000 60,000 $1,320,000
Scenario 1,000 tickets/month Annual cost
Before AI (all manual at $22) $22,000/mo $264,000
After AI (60% deflected at $3, 40% assisted at $12) $6,600/mo $79,200
Annual savings on ticket handling alone $184,800

Want to run these numbers against your own service desk?

We'll walk through the ROI calculation with you in a 30-minute session — using your actual ticket volume, team size, and current tool costs. No slides. Just your numbers.

Book a personalised ROI session with Servicely
1Annual ticket handling cost (monthly volume × 12 × $22 per ticket)
2Current platform licensing + implementation overhead
3Analyst capacity lost to low-value work (hours × analyst fully-loaded cost)
4Estimated employee lost productivity from MTTR (avg resolution time × impacted users × avg. hourly cost)
1New platform licensing (compare against current — Servicely typically lands at a fraction of ServiceNow's cost)
2Reduced ticket handling (60% of volume deflected; remainder at reduced cost per ticket)
3Analyst capacity recovered (40% productivity gain applied to current team cost)
4MTTR-related productivity recovery (300% faster resolution applied to your incident frequency)

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