Ivanti’s restless users have been promised significantly better customer care by the US-based IT security and service management firm – with the company announcing the launch of a new business unit set up “with the single purpose of pleasing its customers through providing long term value.”
The move follows a executive shake-up at the start of this year, including the appointment of a new CEO, Jim Schaper, and a shift away from a “broad-based distribution model” to a “focused channel partner model” under which partners will be paid a fixed commission for sales and support.
Ivanti employs over 1,700 people. Its software is used by 78 of the Fortune 100, which typically use it to marry their ITSM, IT asset management, IT security, endpoint management, and supply chain capabilities.
The company has work to do: social forums show a steady stream of customer complaints about crashes, missing emails/links and bugs. In many cases IT developers have taken to social media forums like Twitter to haul the company over the coals publicly and highlight their issues.
Hey @GoIvanti your UWM Watchdog agent is supposed to spot and fix problems, not cause them. It constantly consumes most of 1 of the 2 vCPUs & is the same after a service restart. Just upgraded to 2019.1 SP2 pic.twitter.com/WJ3nGwsmjJ
— Guy Leech (@guyrleech) January 8, 2020
Content from our partners
Reddit user HullofFame was among those listing some of the key problems they were having with Ivanti in a thread last year, noting “We’ve had issues when a reboot flag would errantly [sic] start getting set on all of our managed machines. All workstations. All servers. All of a sudden, everyone is prompted to reboot. If you don’t respond in a certain amount of time, then it reboots automatically. Apparently Ivanti’s software was looking in the same registry key that our Sophos AV used for a different use.
“When Sophos would update the key, Ivanti would use the change as a reboot flag and initiate a reboot on every machine. Not great.”
The new unit will have “focused development for all its products and services driven by customers’ feedback and requirements” Ivanti said.
Ivanti Mixes up the Board
Last month the company’s long time CEO Steve Daly stepped down. He retains a place on the board. His replacement is Jim Schaper who before joining Ivanti was founder and CEO of enterprise software firm Infor.
The move appears to spearheaded by private equity firm and Ivanti owner Clearlake Capital, which has over $16 billion of assets under management. Clearlake has promised Ivanti will be an “aggressive market consolidator” and has appointed a number of other senior figures to Ivanti leadership positions.
Going into 2020 the company plans to focus on two key areas: unified endpoint management and enterprise service management, it said this week.
“Ensuring our customers’ success starts before they purchase our software by gaining a deep understanding and alignment of their needs and expectations, and continues through onboarding, technical support, enablement and consulting services,” said Chief Customer Officer Mary Trick.
“Our goal is to provide all of our customers with a great experience and to bring meaningful value to their organization to significantly improve their operations and bottom line. Customers are everything to us.”
