Marval is a relatively small company operating out of Kettering, Northamptonshire but with additionally a successful operation in the Netherlands.  Marval’s products are Open Pursuit, for Incident, Problem and Change Management, and Open Trakit for Configuration Management.

One of the main advantages to Marval’s product suite is that it offers a complete out of the box solution.  It is heavily based around ITIL and as such covers all the major ITIL disciplines.  It has a low level of maintenance required and as such the support costs for Marval are very low.

The other main advantage to Marval is that it has a very strong reporting capability.  They have a built in graphing function that allows the user to produce “top ten” reports from any list, as well as printing lists in the normal way.

One of the main disadvantages to Marval is that it recognises only a standard configuration type.  Whilst identifying and recording hardware, software and documents are not a problem, recording configuration types that Marval hasn’t considered is troublesome and can be annoying.

Some people may feel that the GUI has a slightly tired look to it, but it performs well and gets the job done efficiently.  Marval have attempted to make all records only one click away, and have succeeded in achieving this, making it a very attractive product to the end user.  The web front end developed by Marval has a good look and feel about it, and provides a lot of the functionality found in the main client.

ITLPeople.com feel that overall Marval is an extremely reliable product, heavily based around ITIL, and does a very good job.

Update - January 2003

Marval's products were nominated as a finalist in the Service Management Innovation of the Year award at the itSMF Conference 2002.

Update - April 2003

Marval are now considered a medium sized company in the U.K., whilst they are now the largest ITIL Compliant Service Management Software supplier in the Benelux.

Marval are set to release version 5.5 of their Service Management tool, Open Pursuit.  This is a welcome improvement on the last version.  The GUI has been greatly enhanced, giving the interface a much more Windows XP look and feel to it.  For a look at the new incident control screen, click here.  You can see that this is a vast improvement on the old screen.  Marval have also undertaken a lot of work with the Trackit side of their tool, and this has been vastly improved.  It is now much easier for users to implement any asset information that is outside the brief of IT related configuration management.

In addition to this comes a new module, Open Stock.  This is used to keep track of your store items, measures minimum re-order levels, and supports the complete procurement (ordering) process, it is fully integrated with Open Trakit for configuration management.

It is good to see Marval continuing to develop their toolset, and to address the issues of concern which many of their users have expressed.

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