There is Zero Reason, Anymore, to Buy an Overpriced ITSM or ESM

For a long time, moving from one ITSM to another carried a set of roadblocks - some real and some perceived. That was especially true when the product you were leaving was a premium one, especially with a lot of data and workflows already committed to it.

So in this blog I want to go through these objections, one at a time, and work out which of them are worth evaluating. This will not be a marketing version of the objections but the ones that people usually admit.

We built a competing product, so read this blog as an argument rather than an audit.

Roadblocks that should genuinely stop you

You use the platform for far more than service management. If you are running IT operations management, security operations, governance and risk, and application development on the same platform, then service management is one module of many and replacing it is not the question you are actually asking.

You have a mature CMDB that other things depend on. A CMDB that is actually current, fed by discovery, and driving change risk assessment and impact analysis. That is genuinely hard to rebuild and really valuable. Most organizations do not have this, and the ones that do know the exiting system's value.

Your regulator requires a specific certification the alternative does not have. Rare, decisive, and nothing to argue with.

Except for the above three objections, if you come face-to-face with any other objection/reason as listed below, you might want to stop paying for an overpriced ITSM or ESM.

Let's take a look below;

Objection - "We have too much built in it"

This is an objection I hear the most, and the way it is phrased hides the real concern.

It usually means that a migration will take eighteen or so months and consume a team we do not have. In truth, usually nobody knows what is in the system. It may have forty integrations built over nine years, two hundred workflows, half of them created by people who left. The real fear is not the effort of moving so much as the discovery.

Objection rebuttal

I would say two things about that.

1. AI has changed migration economics substantially: what used to be a discovery and rebuild exercise measured in quarters is now measured in weeks, and we run transitions in fifteen to thirty days, with workflows read and translated rather than reverse-engineered by hand.
2. The undocumented estate you are afraid to move is a problem whether or not you move. Every year it gets harder to change, more people who understood it leave, and more of your operating model depends on things nobody can explain. A migration forces the audit you have been postponing. That is uncomfortable and it is not a reason to stay.

Worth asking: of those hundreds of built-in workflows, how many fired in the last ninety days? In my experience this number surprises people, and it usually surprises them downward.

Objection - "No other product can do what ours does"

This objection is somewhat true, but also irrelevant.

Objection rebuttal

The premium platforms genuinely do more, but the question is not what the product can do. Rather, it is what you use, and whether the things you use are the things that justify the price.

So run the comparison properly. List the capabilities you actually depend on - not the ones in the contract but the ones that would break something if they disappeared tomorrow. Then compare that list against the viable alternative.

Most organizations find that this list comes out shorter than they expected, and that a meaningful part of it is service management fundamentals available in any serious product. The differentiating capabilities are real but few, and the price is attached to the whole platform rather than to those few.

There is a second version of this objection worth naming. It sounds something on the lines of "nobody else can do it at our scale." Scale claims are testable. Ask for a reference at your size and your complexity, and ask for performance metrics in month six rather than at go-live.

Objection - "My career is linked to this product"

Nobody says this out loud in a vendor meeting. Almost everybody thinks it, and it decides more of these evaluations than any technical factor.

Objection rebuttal

I want to treat it seriously rather than dismiss it, because the concern is rational. Someone with a decade of expertise, several certifications and a professional network built inside one ecosystem is being asked to consider giving up a large part of what makes them valuable. That is a real cost to a real person, and telling them it should not matter is both wrong and ineffective.

Two honest observations;

1. The scarce skill in this field is shifting quickly. Knowing how to configure a particular platform is worth less every year. Knowing how to design service delivery, decide what should be automated, govern what AI agents are permitted to do, and measure the outcomes - that is worth more every year, and it is portable. The people who transition well from a legacy platform are usually the ones who move toward the process problem and away from the configuration role alone.
2. The platform you are certified for is constantly changing under the hood regardless. Every major vendor in this space is rebuilding around AI, which means the specific knowledge is depreciating whether you switch or not.

The person whose career is genuinely at risk is the one who spends five more years becoming an expert in a configuration model that stops mattering.

Objection - "Security"

Sometimes, the concerns about 'security' is real, but sometimes it is a proxy. Here is what I mean;

Objection rebuttal

• When the 'security' concern is real, it is answerable: certifications, data residency, tenant isolation, what the AI is permitted to read, retention, who can see what, and whether the audit trail would satisfy someone asking a difficult question a year later. Any serious vendor should answer all of that in a document, and you should ask for it early on.
• When the security concern is a proxy, what sits underneath it is usually one of three things. Procurement fatigue, because a new vendor means a new security review and it is exhausting to run one. Vendor risk, meaning you are worried about betting on a smaller company. Or genuine uncertainty about AI governance, which is reasonable and deserves its own conversation.

Objection - "Ours is an ESM platform, not just ITSM"

Objection rebuttal

I will start this with an example. Plenty of organizations have bought some HR module, the facilities module and the legal module. But they usually use only one of them fully, and maybe another one partially. Suppose HR is genuinely running on the platform, i.e. their own catalog, their own workflows, their own case management, with HR administering it themselves - that would be a serious dependency and worth weighing.

However, if your HR function has just a form on the portal and everything else still happens in a shared mailbox, then you licensed an ESM but did not implement it. That is not a reason to stay. If anything it is a reason to look, because the thing you paid for did not happen and it is worth asking why.

The question I would put to any organization making this objection: what proportion of HR requests actually arrive through the platform?

The answer is usually and unsurprisingly low.

Objection - "We are locked into the contract"

True, and it is a timing question rather than a decision question.

Objection rebuttal

You will pay until the renewal, so the contract does not determine what you should do, only when you can do it. Treating a contractual constraint as a strategic decision is how organizations end up three years further in, having renewed once more because the evaluation never started.

The practical move is to run the evaluation now, on the timeline the contract allows, so that renewal becomes a decision rather than a default. Evaluations can take months, but contracts renew in an afternoon.

Objection - "We have ten years of ticket history"

Ticket history matters less than people expect, and the reason is sound.

Objection rebuttal

Historical tickets are useful for two things: trend reporting and spotting automation gaps. The reporting is generally exportable. And for automation, recent data is far more valuable than old data. E.g. a service desk's ticket volume from 2017 may describe workflows, an application estate and a working pattern that no longer exists.

Another important question that arises is - if a decade of ticket data is genuinely central to how you operate, what is it feeding into? If it sits in a system nobody queries except during audits, it is an archive rather than an asset, and archives can be exported.

Objection - "We can hire certified people for this platform tomorrow"

Fair point, but worth turning around!

Objection rebuttal

Needing a supply of certified specialists to configure and maintain a platform is a cost, not a benefit. The reason that market exists is that the platform requires it. A product that a non-technical person in HR can configure is a big benefit rather than a gap - because it does not require a formal certification ecosystem.

The question to ask is not whether you can hire certified professionals for a platform. Rather, how many of those people you need and how much do they add up to the overall platform cost?

Objection - "Will you still exist in five years?"

The most legitimate objection on this list after the first three, and it deserves a straight answer.

Objection rebuttal

Three of the most prominent AI service management products were acquired within four months of each other. The incumbents are buying the disruptors, and the product you chose last year may have different owners and a different roadmap this year. So, 'continuity' is not something the large vendors can promise either.

What you can reasonably ask any vendor is;

• Who owns you?
• What happens to the roadmap on acquisition?
• What the data export path looks like?
• What the contractual position is if the product you bought becomes a component of something else?

I encourage you to ask us these questions too!

Objection - "Nobody got fired for buying the incumbent"

This one is the institutional version of the career objection that is deciding a great many evaluations.

Objection rebuttal

The observation I have here is that the defensibility of that position has a shelf life. The argument held when the alternative was an unproven startup and the incumbent was obviously safe. And, altogether it holds less well when the incumbent's own pricing is a line item your CFO asks about, and the alternatives already have named customers at your scale.

At some point the safe choice becomes the one you have to explain.

The verdict for you

Take the first three genuine objections off the table first: platform breadth well beyond service management, a mature CMDB other things depend on, and a regulatory certification you specifically require. If any of those apply to you, this article is not about your situation.

Other than that, look at what is left:

• undocumented complexity that is a problem either way

• capabilities you do not use

• careers that are shifting regardless

• security concerns that are usually procurement concerns

• ESM you licensed and did not implement

• a contract that dictates timing rather than direction

• history that is exportable

• a certification market that exists because the product needs one

• a preference for the incumbent that used to be the safe answer

None of those are good enough reasons to pay for an overpriced ITSM and/or ESM system that has little value.

My position is not that everyone should leave their ITSM. My position is that most organizations have never seriously asked, and the objections that stopped them from asking no longer hold.

Unsure about proven, secure, AI-native ITSM/ESM alternatives?
Talk to us! Our team will be happy to show you the full savings and ROI picture with Rezolve.ai