BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management Reviews

We are a partner for OpenText and BMC, and this is our main professional service delivery. We are the professional service delivery arm for both of them.

I am responsible for the ITSM products, such as OpenText SMAX, Helix ITSM, and others.

It is not only ITSM, it is an ESM as well.

It is mainly the DWP. And the ITSM modules, IAM, incident, request, change, and others. Mainly for the ESM, the most beneficial layer is the interfacing layer of the DWP, the Digital Workplace. And actually the advanced service catalog.

The underlying work orders and workflows of the service catalog are a mainly critical point for the ESM and even the interface for the ITSM tool as well.

Recently, it is good. It is promising. It is still not totally amazing. Even for BMC, for OpenText, for ServiceNow, for all the vendors, it is a booming technology. And all vendors are trying to integrate it inside their ITSM tools. Still, there are some limitations, especially related to the Arabic language, especially for the Middle East. The LLM language model and LLM models are not supporting Arabic for most of the tools. So this is a weakness. However, I can see some vendors are still working on this point right now because there are LLM models in the market supporting Arabic.

For automation, you have multiple tools depending on the vendor. For example, for OpenText, we have an OO integration, Operation Orchestration with SMAX. For BMC, we have Control-M as well, and can automate some items. All vendors as well inside their portfolio are considering the automation. It is not a native function inside the tool, but actually within the portfolio with seamless integration. It fits for purpose.

It is perfect, unless there is the support of the Arabic language. Supporting the Arabic language is the critical point, especially for ESM more than ITSM. Because for the ITSM, most of the IT staff can handle the English or any language besides Arabic. But when you are targeting the ESM, you are targeting the HR team, the finance team, the maintenance team. Not all these teams treat with English terminologies or report their cases with English. At this moment, the Arabic language or their native Arabic language should be considered and it will be more important inside the chatbots. I would prefer to chat with my own language.

Enhancing AI support for the Arabic languages, enhancing the automation of the ticket, and automation of the ticket workflows would make it simpler for implementation and simpler for enhancements. Adding more capabilities for adding more flexibility of the customization is important. This is not only for BMC, even for OpenText, even for ServiceNow. As long as you are moving to a low-code platform, you are limiting my capability to customize. The solution will be fit for purpose perfectly for a low-customization environment. However, it is a limitation for the low-code environments. All low-code environments have limitations when customizing. When you compare, for example, in OpenText, when you compare SMAX to the legacy Service Manager, Service Manager has more capabilities for customization, more than SMAX. This is the same between Helix and Remedy. Overall, BMC still has a very powerful way to customize. It still has a very good customization capability.

For the last 10 years.

All vendors have several plans for support, for supporting models. From premium to standard, advanced. It depends on the supporting package you purchased. For example, if you are talking about premier support in OpenText or BMC or whatever, and you have a dedicated resource, the response time will be much better. The initial phases of investigation will be very short because you have a dedicated, assigned resource who is understanding your environment, already knows your environment, already knows your understanding and your needs, so it will be much better.

Also, for the support of BMC, especially for BMC Helix on cloud as a software-as-a-service, the support will be faster than the response in investigating an on-prem solution. This is crucial for the troubleshooting of the infrastructure or a bug. For example, if a system is down totally, I am not talking about software enhancements or an issue inside the tool itself, but talking about if a system is down or if you have a critical ticket, BMC Helix SaaS is very good for support, more than support for on-prem. This is the same for ServiceNow, same for OpenText, same for everything. It is about the SaaS supporting model because the resource is already understanding or well-understanding the infrastructure deployment that happened on the cloud, on their cloud.

All vendors can compete with their pricing. All vendors for the same class, for example, if you are talking about the world-class such as BMC, ServiceNow, OpenText, all of them can compete in front of each other. I am not talking about the same price for medium-scale such as ManageEngine or smaller tools. But for the same scale of the vendors, almost all of them are near to each other.

In my last company, during a tenure of around one year, I used BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management where I explored this functionality and went through many improvements.

As I was in the infrastructure management team, my team and I utilized BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management for ticketing purposes. Similarly, I was the system analyst, so I used to explore some reports and export import functionality.

At the starting of my career, I utilized ServiceNow. Then I moved to Mahle, where I got to know about BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management. Based on our regular operations, ticketing handling and asset management, we used this tool. This was a very fantastic experience for me in my last company with this tool.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has really shaped Mahle, my last company, and their IT operations support system in a very formal way. The entire Mahle global team has adopted this tool. BMC has also given an excellence award to the Mahle team.

I noticed the resolution time improved because once the ticket falls into the bucket of the engineer, the engineers proactively contact the user. The communication mode became a very good option for this. Users are satisfied because they do not have to contact any person directly. They only have to create a ticket and someone from the IT team will reach out to them directly. This is a very good result and response from the users.

The ticketing system in BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has a user interface. Once the user submits a ticket, the ticket is created and automatically routed based on the category that the user has selected. Since we were the on-site IT team, if the issue is related to on-site IT, it directly falls into our bucket. Once it is in our bucket, we acknowledge that ticket and assist the user. Similarly, every day, I used to export the whole open tickets and on-hold tickets, and I used to give a quick review of why the ticket is pending and how long the SLA is.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management provides a good and user-oriented interface. From the data perspective, it is also very useful to easily create and export the reports whatever you want. Overall, the interface, as well as the reporting and the operation inside, front end and back end is very good.

In a company, the non-tech people always want a very user-friendly portal where they can create a ticket regarding their issue. BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has provided that user-friendly interface for the non-tech people. Similarly, for us as tech people, whatever we use, minor or major information, we are getting properly.

All functionality that is available in BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is very good. What they can do is enhance some AI tool so that the entire system can easily move into automation.

In my last company, during a tenure of around one year, I used BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

At the starting of my career, I utilized ServiceNow. Then I moved to Mahle, where I got to know about BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

Being a technical person and a non-technical person as well, what I actually used to get from a portal related to ITSM made me give BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management a perfect score. I rate BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management with a score of 10 out of 10.

My main use case for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is related to the environment; once I provide feedback, it's helpful if your environment needs this service to serve it. BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management portal is divided into multiple services, including Discovery, workflow, ITSM, BHOM, dashboard, and service monitoring, all powered by AI. I have worked on all of these features, which has helped me. We use ITSM in our company to solve the ticketing system for support tickets, and there are workflows opened from divisions like financial and sales that are very helpful. The Discovery tool helps discover all your assets in your company, making it necessary for collaboration between your servers and services.

Out of all those services, I mainly interact with the BHOM part day-to-day, where I work on the events that trigger the services and servers based on the threshold monitored by the monitor policy and the alarm policy. I also follow up with service monitoring. If there is any event opened or an incident occurred, it gets flagged based on these policies. The AI features help predict future issues with the server or service, such as potential thresholds being reached after a few hours. Therefore, I am mainly dedicated to BHOM.

One unique aspect of my workflow with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is that the dashboard reflects results from the BHOM, as well as from Discovery and service monitoring. Before using BHOM, it's important to have a good Discovery to know all your assets, as this assists in monitoring your services effectively.

The best features of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management depend on what your environment needs, as different companies might only require the dashboard or just Discovery without BHOM, ITSM, or workflow.

Personally, the most valuable features for my environment include BHOM, service monitoring, and the dashboard. The Discovery tool is necessary but works best in tandem with BHOM and service monitoring to establish reliable monitoring and insights into my environment.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has positively impacted my organization by sending event alerts. For instance, if I monitor a server with disk thresholds, an email alert notifies the end user when storage is reaching its maximum capacity, which is extremely helpful.

By receiving alerts and emails ahead of time, I have noticed reductions in downtime. For example, monitoring a Hyper-V environment allows me to keep an eye on the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). When the CSV nears capacity, I can take action before an outage occurs, which has been crucial for system stability.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could use improvements on the dashboard; having a ready-to-use dashboard that just needs asset information instead of building one from scratch would be helpful. The lack of templates for dashboards and limited email notification customization are also areas needing attention.

I have been using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management for one year.

In my experience, BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is stable.

The scalability of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is good, as it grows with our organization's needs.

I have had positive experiences with customer support, having worked with both third-party teams and the BMC support team, including escalating cases to the R&D team which have been resolved successfully.

Negative

I did not use any solution before BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, but I worked with a company that used ManageEngine, which is also good. I am familiar with other tools such as SolarWinds and Zabbix, but my primary experience is with ManageEngine.

I have seen a return on investment, especially in terms of time saved. For instance, developing metrics to monitor disk capacity prevents potential disasters.

I do not have any advice for others looking into using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, as I have provided all the information I have. I do not have any additional thoughts about BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management before we wrap up. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

On-premises

I use BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management primarily for IT service management. It supports modules like incident management, change management, problem management, release management, and configuration management.

While I cannot provide very particular details about the most helpful features, I also use other tools like ServiceNow and Jira that have similar features. Some of the changes required are at the framework level, which may not be feasible to change immediately. Incorporating features available in ServiceNow would greatly enhance BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

There are several areas where BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could be improved. Currently, ServiceNow has an edge when it comes to the ease of discovering Configuration Items (CIs). In BMC Helix, there are issues with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), such as duplicate entries and problems with reconciliation. The recently introduced dashboard tool in Helix, which replaced Smart Reporting, has several issues. Reporting has been a consistent problem in BMC, and it would greatly benefit from enhancements.

I have been using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management for about fifteen years now.

I did encounter issues, but they were not overly complex. Overall, I would rate the complexity of the migration as medium.

The stability of the solution could be improved, specifically in the area of the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), where there are issues with duplicate entries and reconciliation.

The support of BMC is generally good and better compared to some competitors. However, there is room for improvement in new products like the dashboard tool.

I previously used the older Remedy solution before migrating to BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

I migrated from an older Remedy to Helix Remedy, which took around six to nine months. It wasn't extremely complex, but there were some issues during the migration.

While I am not very sure about the pricing, I have heard that the license cost of BMC is relatively lower than its competitors.

Other solutions I work with include ServiceNow and Jira, which also have similar features.

The decision to use BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management depends on the specific use case and requirements. Overall, I would recommend considering other tools if their features align better with organizational needs. I would rate the overall solution a 7 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Other

Over three jobs, I have used BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management for seven years. My main use case for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is incident management. I work on tickets created by users, create tickets for users, keep the users up to date, conduct investigations, log information, and perform similar tasks in my day-to-day work.

The best features BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management offers are making comments visible to users and multiple fields that can be customized. I find myself relying on the public comment feature for all users the most, as it is very effective.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has positively impacted my organization by helping us maintain a good relationship with end users. Communication has become easier to conduct and maintain, which has improved our relationships.

I have not identified any features that would be required at the moment for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

I have been working in my current field for twelve months.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is stable. We did not experience problems with the application itself, but rather with our network.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management demonstrates good scalability.

I have not accessed customer support for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, as we have not encountered that need.

Negative

We previously used HPSM and switched because that solution was outdated and no longer satisfied our needs.

I have not observed a return on investment, but we manage incidents much better in BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

My advice to others looking into using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is to trust the application because it will serve you well. I would rate this product ten out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)