If annual maintenance and professional services are keeping your platform operational without materially increasing the value you get through automation, capacity or service quality, it’s worth comparing what the same investment could achieve elsewhere.

Think about:

• What has Sunrise delivered in the last two years that you actively use?
• What additional services have you had to purchase?
• What would it cost to upgrade or migrate to SaaS?
• Is your annual expenditure creating new value or just preserving existing capability?
• Will there still be people around in a year or two who can support and adapt our customisations?

Yes.

Hornbill Service Manager provides the core capabilities expected of enterprise ITSM, including incident, request, problem, change, service catalogue, asset, configuration and knowledge management.

However, it should not be viewed simply as a like-for-like copy of Sunrise. Hornbill is a continuously delivered cloud platform that brings ITSM, enterprise service management, codeless workflow, integration and governed AI together. This means you can replace the processes you rely on today while creating room to automate more work, improve self-service and extend service management beyond IT.

The comparison is therefore not only feature against feature, but what each platform enables you to achieve next.

Yes.

Hornbill can replace an on-premise Sunrise environment, but the move is treated as a planned platform transition rather than a technical version upgrade.

Discovery establishes which services, workflows, integrations, reports and historical data are genuinely required in the new environment. Hornbill can then be configured around priority outcomes, with data migration, testing, training and cutover planned around operational risk.

Depending on complexity, an organisation may move in one controlled go-live or adopt Hornbill progressively by service or team. This also provides an opportunity to simplify legacy processes instead of carrying years of unnecessary configuration into a modern cloud platform. 

Hornbill uses continuous cloud delivery, with new functionality and platform updates applied automatically.

Customers don't have to install major releases, maintain application infrastructure or commission recurring upgrade projects simply to remain current.

This removes much of the planning, testing and professional-services effort traditionally associated with on-premise version changes. It also keeps customers on a common, supported service, so Hornbill’s support and development resources are not divided across multiple legacy versions.

Organisations retain control over how and when they introduce new capabilities into their operating model, while the underlying platform is kept current by Hornbill.

Yes, but migration should be selective and purposeful.

The first step is to determine which data has operational, reporting or compliance value—for example, users, services, assets, knowledge and relevant request history. Source data is then assessed for quality, ownership and mapping before it is imported, validated and reconciled in Hornbill.

The same principle applies to service processes. Existing workflows can inform the new design, but they don't have to be reproduced exactly if a simpler or more automated approach would deliver a better result.

The final scope, migration method and timescale will depend on the Sunrise deployment and the volume and condition of the data. 

Sunrise positions Solvyr primarily around AI-assisted service desk activities, including automatic triage, suggested resolutions, knowledge creation, sentiment analysis and improved communications.

Hornbill HAi covers analyst assistance too, but extends AI across the wider service experience: conversational employee support, agentic automation that can coordinate and execute approved work, and integrated controls for governing that activity.

In simple terms, Solvyr is largely presented as helping analysts handle tickets more efficiently; Hornbill’s broader proposition is to reduce the need for routine tickets and safely automate more of the work behind them.

Hornbill embeds AI oversight into our HAi Governance Studio. With Hornbill, every AI-powered action and interaction is controlled, secure, auditable and traceable.

• Role-based access controls define who can use individual AI capabilities.

• Guardrails and data boundaries limit which systems, services and information AI can access.

• Agent-level controls determine what each agent can do.

• Human-in-the-loop approvals can be required before sensitive or high-impact actions proceed.

• AI activity is recorded through audit trails and reporting, making actions transparent and reviewable.

• The HAi Value Dashboard also tracks adoption, usage, time savings and cost reduction, helping organisations demonstrate whether AI is producing measurable value rather than simply adding another layer of technology. 

Yes.

Hornbill is a unified enterprise service management platform, allowing IT, HR, Facilities, Finance, Procurement, L&D, EDI, Operational Technology, Public Relations, Data Teams, Information Security and other functions to manage services in one environment.

Each team can create and manage its own catalogue, workflows, queues, permissions and service measures while sharing a common portal, data model and automation layer.

This makes cross-department processes easier to coordinate cross-enterprise processes and gives employees a more joined-up way to request help.

Organisations can begin with ITSM and expand progressively, avoiding the need to buy and integrate a separate service management tool for every business function.