BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

Multifunctional tracking

This product allows us to efficiently track all outstanding tickets. Enabling the submitter to update the diaries, reopen tickets, expedite and reroute for faster processing.

I believe the software can be a little bit more user friendly. It can be a bit busy when using the resources provided.

I've used it for eight years.

There were minimal issues due to a multi-office implementation.

There were minimal issues due to a multi-office implementation. 

There were minimal issues due to a multi-office implementation.

I have previously used Spiceworks. Remedy was tested and accepted based on organization decision.

Straightforward. Basic read, follow and flow.

We did it in-house.

Good product and easy to use. Good for new users.

For us, there are two main features that are most valuable:

• IT Service Management, and
• Service Support

It holds us accountable for IT services, leading to a reduction in IT service outages.

It's also given us a tight and streamlined management of services and reduction in resource utilization.

It could be improved in the areas of cloud management, documentation, and training.

I've been using it for 10+ years.

We didn't encounter any issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It's scaled for us as needed.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is good.

We didn't use a previous solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We used a vendor team for implementation. There was a significant time frame for analysis and design in implementing the solution.

We didn't look at other solutions.

I highly recommend this solution.

Call logging and escalation features are the most valuable for us because they are easy to use and with them, we can assign a request to a specific person or department.

It made the organization better. We have been able to improve our SLAs because previously no one was assigned to a job and we could ignore it.

It doesn't allow a person logging a call to assign the ticket to a specific department, but only to update it.

I've been using it for seven months in the IT service desk.

No issues with deployment.

There have been no stability issues.

No scalability issue.

• Incident management
• Change management
• Problem management
• Knowledge management

In BMC Remedy, their foundation data is well organized. A customer will raise a request through the self-service tool (BMC SRM), and the ticket will go to the help desk through automatic routing. The help desk will check the incident and assign it to the right support team. Once the ticket is assigned, the SLA will start. The support team should then work as per the SLA defined for the particular request. A ticket can be raised though email, or events depending on the integration with other monitoring tools.

Assets in the organization can be managed in the CMDB and Asset Management application. Any activity to be scheduled in the organization, such as weekly maintenance activity or change requests, can be raised at the same time and the scheduled time can be defined.

For recurring Incidents, a problem ticket can be raised and the root cause of the problem can be found. For resolving any incident, a knowledge base article can be created which will contain the solution of of the issue.

Many things still need improvement, and they are mostly related to the customization aspects of the tool.

I've been using it for five years.

There is no such issue while deploying the application in the environment as long as you follow best practice as defined by BMC.

BMC Remedy is stable with one improvement with the recent version. Currently, 9.0.01 is the latest stable release and v9.1 will be released after the complete testing of 9.1 Beta.

10/10

10/10

I've not used any other tool.

You need to follow the installation steps during deployment of application.

I did multiple projects for BMC Remedy implementations, both server group and non-server group environment. All the projects had different business requirement, and all of them are live and running successfully.

It is flexible and can be used for any type of company, whether it's finance, or transport, etc. It uses ITIL standards, and has the flexibility to integrate with other applications and can also be customized as needed.

If you want your company to follow ITIL processes, want to use a tool which follows the standards, and is also flexible enough to be customized and integrated with other application or tools then I feel this is a good choice to invest in this tool.

It has complete coverage of ITIL processes and a rich functionality. Plus, it provides a strong customisation platform in AR System which is quite flexible.

BMC Remedy ITSM has been used both by the customers that I served as well as the software services companies that I actually worked for while serving those customers. In each case that I have seen so far, BMC Remedy has typically been implemented to transform multiple older ticketing systems into a centralised single IT ticketing system. In the case of telecom vendors, largely it is doing the job of network (operations support systems) ticketing and is integrated with variety of non-BMC applications. In each case, it has helped customers transform their applications stack and bring in a uniform, standardised process when compared to the past. This results in savings and streamlining of both people and processes.

The traditional UI of Remedy is somewhat of a weak point from the end user perspective. Also, from a developer perspective, a lack of version of management support unlike traditional programming languages such as Java/C# etc where you can easily create code lines, create branches/merge branches, create automated drops of code etc. One can't do this in Remedy in that manner. In general, Remedy doesn't support very aggressive Agile development and is more conducive to a waterfall kind of SDLC. Also, the debugging of defects or performance issues in Remedy is not well assisted by the Remedy Developer Studio.

I have been using BMC products for around nine years, since 2006. My experience includes older versions such as 7.0.1, and 7.6.03/04.

By itself the product is ok, but frequently people follow incorrect procedures while doing custom coding. BMC does provide guidelines to avoid this, but AR systems as such doesn't prevent you from coding in the incorrect manner, so such bad customisation can cause deployment/upgrade issues later. From versions 7.6.04 and 8.1 onwards, this is largely addressed due to the introduction of the overlay concept, but it is still not too easy to upgrade wherever you have heavy customisation.

Again the stability is frequently related to custom code rather than out of the box code. I don't think it is unusual for any application going live for the first time to be a bit unstable for the first two to three releases, at least after the first ever go-live.

Not much - it is highly scalable.

Customer service can vary wildly. With premier support from BMC, which is very expensive I believe, it can be quite fast and dedicated. But, if you have bronze, a basic service or worse, if you don't have direct service from BMC but only have access to them via some intermediate partner - then it may not always be smooth.

I have experienced service to both extremes - very good and not good at all! Currently I am driving a project that has premier support so it is quite good in this case. They helped a lot in sorting out upgrade related issues and we had a very smooth excellent upgrade from 8.1 patch 002 to SP2.

Typically our customers switched from other products such as Amdocs Clarify or People Soft or home grown ticketing applications to BMC Remedy because the older platforms were not supported by the original vendor anymore OR they found the older solution was not scaling to their needs. Plus, older ticketing functionality was typically fragmented across multiple applications - e.g. for incident management, they may use one application and a completely different application for change management and so on. Now, it is all within one suite which is much easier to handle.

BMC Remedy is set up for a real production environment and can be quite complex depending on what you have. For normal DEV/TEST environments, it is fairly straightforward, but it certainly is nothing like MS Office or something, where you can blindly click next-next and then finish and forget about the installation! It is a complex enterprise application and needs proper administration on an ongoing basis.

In all cases, I have had my own set of people (belonging to a software services company) that did the implementation. In India, we have a pretty good pool of people available for this in general.

I believe there is a strong need to actually compare Remedy, Service Now and couple of open source or free to download products and bring out what really the free products can achieve vis-a-vis established product like Remedy.

As of now, this is more of a perception (Remedy is costly, Free products have less functionality etc - but hardly anyone is going to great lengths to establish point by point, module by module what really is better in which software).

There is no point in listening to such comparison done by one of the vendors (e.g. BMC Remedy communities are having several comments of how Service Now lacks several things and customers coming back to Remedy. Service Now communities are saying exactly opposite. The need is to take out this bias and put down all the facts in a proper shoot-out.

In most situations, we got involved only when customer had already made a decision to go for BMC Remedy so I can't really comment on this. But I think it is more to do with good sales pitch from BMC and the fact that it is an established tool with large enterprises that has typically tilted the scale towards BMC Remedy.

For large organisations, or a medium organisation that is now growing due to new acquisitions etc. (typically several thousand people strong and a large presence in one or more countries) BMC Remedy is surely a very good choice. For smaller organisations, there is the option of BMC Remedy-On-Demand (ROD), but then they may have cheaper alternatives - or at least options that give low starting price.

The trouble ticket history is valuable if the technician details the resolution of the problem noted.

It tracks all trouble tickets and provides a ticket history. Problems can be researched and solutions applied based on past tickets. It lets the organization know how well the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 folks are doing.

Making it easier to use is very important, and the searching of tickets should be an easy procedure instead of being complex.

I've been using it for three years.

Some settings in the browser had to be adjusted for daily operations.

None that I am aware of.

Most responses are via email support, but the system is quite complex.

They're good.

No, this is the solution the government went with, but after taking a look at BMC Remedy and performing a cost analysis, I did not suggest buying this product. However, powers above me wanted Remedy so it was purchased.

It was complex to setup.

A vendor team setup the initial configuration, and an SME was available for configuration issues. A day's training class, just on how to use it, was provided.

I would estimate that it is quite low, or running at a loss.

I provided my report three years ago, but my suggestion was not taken.

This is a complex product that is quite expensive and there are other solutions out there at a lower cost, or you could work a trouble ticket system by using a Microsoft product.