If I read this correctly, you have no intention of purchasing Service Manager for your customer testing needs for now or in the future. Budget justification is a problem for everyone.

Consultants normally uses their own SM or the customer's own dev/test Service Manager to do their testing. You could opt to use the customer environment which means the testing is guaranteed for the customer's customised environment. Results may vary compared to an out-of-the-box SM environment.

I fully agree with you that there's no clear info regarding trial for SM. In my opinion, there's no trial option for Service Manager as Service Management Automation X is the planned evolution for SM. New customers are directed to evaluate SMAX. Trial/demo for SMAX is available..

All customers or Micro Focus partners with a paid customer subscription name that include SM entitlement are able to download the latest Service Manager and patches from the MySupport portal. SM is being developed and supported. The long awaited 64bit version of SM has just been released in SM 9.70.

Folks at MF specialises in their specific role. Not everyone worked in different roles and have knowledge in various areas, except for the oldies, like me. Also, not all are in the tech community. I hope this oldie managed to answer some your questions.