We Are Gathered Here Today

We Are Gathered Here Today

We are gathered here today to say farewell to Cherwell Service Management.

Twenty years. That's how long Cherwell has been part of the ITSM landscape. Born in 2004, it was different from everything else in the market from the start. Not louder, not flashier, not better at the trade show booth. Just genuinely, quietly different in a way that took some people a while to figure out and others only a few hours with the product to completely fall for.

What Made Cherwell, Cherwell

Most service management tools of that era made decisions for you. They had a way of doing things and your job was to conform to their model. Cherwell took the opposite approach. It gave you out-of-the-box content you could use as-is or throw out entirely. It handed you a toolbox and got out of your way. You paid for your licenses, you got access to the full platform, and what you built with it was entirely up to you.

No coding required. No extra charge to use a feature. No module unlocks behind a higher tier. You bought the software and you built what you needed.

Didn't want to build from scratch? No problem. There was a thriving partner ecosystem and a community of people who had already solved problems like yours and were happy to share how they did it. Need something polished and production-ready fast? Plenty of partners could take your specs and deliver. Want to figure it out yourself? The tools were there and the community had your back.

Could it be quirky? Absolutely. There were moments where you'd stare at the screen and wonder why something worked the way it did. But there was almost always a way through. That was the other thing about Cherwell: the answer was usually in there somewhere. It just required a little creativity to find it.

A Personal Note

I came to Cherwell in 2012 through a new job at a global company that had no centralized service desk. None. I couldn't wrap my head around how a large organization had gotten that far without one, but the problem was real and the mandate was clear: build something that actually helps employees when technology fails them.

After a long RFP process, Cherwell won. And the reason it won was the same reason I eventually fell completely in love with it: the possibilities felt genuinely endless. It wasn't just an IT tool. It could work for any department, any workflow, any problem you could frame as a process. All it took was time and creativity.

What started as a few dedicated hours a week turned into dedicated days and eventually a full-time focus. I took on every challenge I could find, including plenty I had no idea how to solve. I called support more times than I can count. They struggled with me. My environment was customized well beyond what they'd typically seen, running versions that tested the edges of what was supported. But somewhere in those calls there was always eventually a rock-star technician who went above and beyond, who explained not just the answer but the thinking behind it. Those conversations didn't just solve my problems. They made me better at the platform.

Something shifted after a while. The more I called in, the more I found myself solving my own problems with just a small nudge from support. They became the moral support I needed to hear "you've got this." And then I started giving that back. I joined the Cherwell Community and started answering questions the same way mine had been answered. Reading a post, seeing the tools I'd use to solve it, and sharing that thinking with someone who was stuck.

My favorite conversations always started with someone saying "you can't do that in Cherwell." My answer was almost always "actually, I think you can. Here's how I did something similar."

That's the culture Cherwell built. Not just a product. A community of people who pushed the platform further than it was supposed to go and shared what they learned along the way.

How We Got Here

Ivanti acquired Cherwell in 2021. The stated goal was convergence: take Cherwell's configurability and bring it into the broader Ivanti platform. What actually happened was a slow wind-down that most of the community had seen coming but hoped wouldn't arrive. In October 2023, Ivanti made it official: Cherwell Service Management would reach end of life on December 31, 2026.

The reaction in the community was frustration more than shock. Not because the news was unexpected, but because of how it landed. Organizations that had been told Cherwell was safe had built years of process on that assumption. Support had been declining. Bug fixes were being turned down as "not on the roadmap." And now, a hard deadline.

For organizations still running Cherwell, that deadline is now less than six months away. Cloud-hosted instances will be shut down. On-premises installations will receive no further patches, no security updates, no support. The platform that a generation of ITSM practitioners built their careers around is going dark.

What Comes Next

The migration market is loud right now. Every ITSM vendor has a "Cherwell replacement" page. Most of them are written by marketing teams who never used the product. They list features, show screenshots, and promise a smooth transition. What they can't offer is the perspective to say: slow down. December 31st is a deadline, not a cliff. A hasty migration to the wrong platform will cost you far more than running unsupported Cherwell for a few extra months while you make the right decision.

That's why we're building ZaxonForge the way we are. Not as another option in a crowded replacement market, but as the platform Cherwell's original architecture was always pointing toward. Metadata-driven, fully configurable, no coding required to make it work the way you need it to, and built by people who spent years pushing Cherwell to its limits and took careful notes about everything they wished it could do.

The toolbox philosophy doesn't have to die with Cherwell. It just needs a new home.

Rest well, old friend. Maybe the end is more like a new beginning?