Hornbill
Last Updated:
Analyst Coverage: David Norfolk
Hornbill was established in 1995 as a privately funded (and currently debt free) IT Service Management (ITSM) vendor. Its Supportworks tool is popular and has a reputation for being good value for money and easy to use.
It has featured in the Gartner ITSM magic Quadrant since 2010, although all the companies in this cluster around the bottom left area, apart from BMC and ServiceNow, which barely escape from this quadrant. This is a somewhat unusual pattern and Hornbill seems determined to escape from the pack, via innovation (with collaborative solutions that could, it hopes, modernise its market).
Hornbill now claims to support some 700-plus customers and 20k ITSM users, in 48 industries; it has a global customer base in 18 countries including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States.
It has found that IT is a driving force for business innovation and that its customers have taken its platform beyond its originally envisaged uses. It is now seeking to exploit this, beyond pure ITSM, with a new collaborative SaaS/cloud-based platform with its own App Store and visual process design and orchestration tools. It says that “business objects created by [our] applications are first-class social objects”. This takes Hornbill away from pure ITSM (which is a governance function in the widest sense) into collaboration and development.
Commentary
Solutions
Coming soon.
Research
Coming soon.