Cherwell Software, LLC, is a privately held American technology company specializing in

IT service management Information technology service management (ITSM) is the activities that are performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. Differing from more technology-or ...

software. The company headquarters is in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It also has offices in Swindon, UK. The company name is taken from the

River Cherwell The River Cherwell ( or ) is a tributary of the River Thames in central England. It rises near Hellidon, Northamptonshire and flows southwards for to meet the Thames at Oxford in Oxfordshire. The river gives its name to the Cherwell local g ...

, which runs through Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, England.

History

Cherwell was founded in 2004 by Vance Brown, a former CEO of GoldMine Software (later, a product by

Ivanti Ivanti () is an IT software company headquartered in South Jordan, Utah, United States. It produces software for IT Security, IT Service Management, IT Asset Management, Unified Endpoint Management, Identity Management and Supply Chain Management. ...

), Arlen S. Feldman and Timothy G. Pfeifer. Cherwell announced their first product in 2007.

Venture capital

In November 2012, Cherwell received a $25 million investment from

Insight Venture Partners Insight Partners (previously Insight Venture Partners) is an American venture capital and private equity firm based in New York City. The firm invests in growth-stage technology, software and Internet businesses. History Insight Partners was fo ...

. The investment was highly unusual for the industry: in exchange for their capital investment, Insight Venture was only granted common stock in the company and did not receive control over day to day operations. CEO Vance Brown told the media that he did not want to worry about having an

exit strategy An exit strategy is a means of leaving one's current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure. An organisation or individual without an exit strategy may be in a quagmire. At worst ...

. In January 2013, the Service Desk Institute accredited Cherwell service management. On February 27, 2017, Cherwell secured a $50 million investment from investment firm

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts KKR & Co. Inc., also known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., is an American global investment company that manages multiple alternative asset classes, including private equity, energy, infrastructure, real estate, credit, and, through its strate ...

(KKR). In January 2018, Craig Harper resigned as CEO, and was replaced by Vance Brown on an interim basis. On April 4, 2018, an additional $172 million investment from KKR included acquiring much of the Insight Venture Partner stake, made them a majority owner. In August 2018, Brown left to lead the National Cybersecurity Center, and Sam Gilliland became chief executive. On June 4, 2020, Cherwell announced Rob Salvagno of KKR and Drew Harman of Insight Venture Partners joined their board. Dave Welsh from KKR, a board member since 2018 became chairman. In January 2021,

announced it would acquire Cherwell for undisclosed terms.

Products

The Cherwell Service Management platform (CSM) is a suite of IT service management applications. Cherwell developed and sells applications designed with

Information Technology Infrastructure Library The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of detailed practices for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL d ...

(ITIL) methodology. Cherwell Service Management 5.0 was released in September 2014 and 6.0 in August 2015. Products include:

incident management An incident is an event that could lead to loss of, or disruption to, an organization's operations, services or functions. Incident management (IcM) is a term describing the activities of an organization to identify, analyze, and correct hazards ...

problem management Problem management is the process responsible for managing the lifecycle of all problems that happen or could happen in an IT service. The primary objectives of problem management are to prevent problems and resulting incidents from happening, to ...

change management Change management (sometimes abbreviated as CM) is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. It includes methods that redirect or redefine the use of ...

, release management,

knowledge management Knowledge management (KM) is the collection of methods relating to creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making ...

, service level management, asset management, service catalog management, service request fulfillment and

project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

. CSM server is available only for Microsoft Windows as is the main client interface. Cherwell developed mobile applications for iOS and Android but they have since been retired as of September 2019. StrataCom Inc., a Cherwell partner, released a Cherwell mobile app and

Kanban Kanban ( Japanese: カンバン and Chinese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing (also called just-in-time manufacturing, abbreviated JIT). Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, devel ...

boards for Cherwell shortly after this. Cherwell develops Express Software Manager for IT asset management and software asset management.

References

{{reflist Information technology management Software companies based in Colorado Software companies of the United States