BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

We are mostly involved in service assurance for telecommunications; service assurance and network provisioning for telecommunications. We use BMC Helix ITSM in these areas.

Most of our use cases involving BMC Helix ITSM are for change management and trouble ticketing. If you look at telecommunications companies, everything revolves around incident problems and change.

The most valuable feature for our customers using BMC Helix ITSM is change management.

BMC Helix ITSM encourages the use of APIs as much as possible. They're looking to use machine learning in the future, and all the time moving towards a zero-touch type environment.

I have customers that always would like to adapt and personalize BMC Helix ITSM more.

I have been using BMC Helix ITSM since it came out. 

BMC Helix ITSM is stable.

Having the solution on the cloud brings increased scalability. The scalability of BMC Helix ITSM is good.

The deployment of BMC Helix ITSM is difficult. If you deploy it in a single-use enterprise it's probably fairly simple. A lot of the deployments of the solution we are doing are at a global level where there is a lot of consolidation. BMC Helix ITSM requires individuals that are doing the process to have a deep understanding of the solution.

A lot of people are moving from legacy on-premise systems to SaaS cloud versions. The most difficult element of doing this is data migration. This process could improve. There are good processes in place for migration, but it's having the level of understanding about what data do you need to migrate that can be difficult.

We use an Agile approach to the implementation of BMC Helix ITSM. We could have a delivery phase that requires six or seven people as part of the delivery in the Agile scrum-type approach. Your next iteration could be two or three people or more. Then you have your consultants on top of that and your architects. However, it is depending on what is required for that sprint. 

What we tend to do is use an initial waterfall approach to create the base, or the minimum viable solution, up and running. Then we move to an Agile sprint approach for iterations and for meeting customer requirements. We figure out what the business requirements are and what are the priorities, et cetera. There can be a lot of teams involved, such as testing and redelivery teams.

I would advise others before implementing this solution to be clear on what they are trying to achieve.

I rate BMC Helix ITSM a nine out of ten.

We use Helix to manage services for clients in Latin America and provide a service desk. 

The Helix chatbot is helpful, and we can use its workflow features to automate some of the use cases for our clients.

Helix is not quite as mature as ServiceNow, which is a complete product. All of its technology is current. Helix needs to enhance some of its functionality with the latest technology. For example, Helix could improve its chatbot automation to automate more use cases.

We have around 25 clients and are in the process of moving one client to Helix. We will continue the deployment over the next 18 months or so.

Helix is stable.

Helix is scalable enough to handle our use cases. We plan to implement it for 200 users, but right now we're at fewer than 20.

We're BMC partners in Latin America, so we have strong support in the region. It isn't a problem.

I can't say much about the implementation because my team handles that, but I think it isn't complex.

We paid a service fee for implementation, and there's an ongoing monthly fee for the Helix, license based on the current number of named users. 

We evaluated ServiceNow, and the features are similar. ServiceNow probably has better functionality. However, BMC offered a better price, so it was ultimately an economic decision. Considering the cost of both solutions, Helix provides the best value for the money.

I rate Helix eight out of 10. 

It is basically in for the management and problem management.

The standards and the framework that it follows are most valuable. It has an ITIL and out-of-the-box framework.

Certain features can be improved. We find ourselves having to make a lot of customizations to make things work for us.

They should add some of the bolt-ons into the initial setup, such as chat.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is reasonably good.

It is scalable.

Their technical support is pretty good.

It was quite complex from memory. It was over three years ago, but it was quite complex.

We did evaluate other options. There were business reasons for choosing BMC over other providers.

I would advise making sure that you have the expertise to administer the system.

I would rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of 10.

Overall, within our company, there are over 15,000 end-users and 400 incident management members using this solution.

You can do some customizing if you want, which is great. It's a very integrated solution. You have incident management, change management, release management, and asset management — all of these things work very well together.

Their customer service catalog (where a customer can order some products) could be improved. This product is not the best, but they are working on it.

It needs to be more comfortable for the end-user. You need to be able to order some products.

I have been using this solution for over ten years.

This solution is very stable.

It's very easy to scale. You can connect one server to another and scale them together if you want.

We have a support partner that handles all of our BMC support-related issues.

For us, the initial setup was complex because we needed a lot of customization done.

We have a team of four staff members, including myself, who look after all maintenance-related issues.

I would absolutely recommend BMC Helix ITSM. There are two solutions to look out for: BMC and ServiceNow. I think both solutions are great solutions but I can't say which one is better.

For a smaller company, a solution like JIRA Help Desk may be better. BCM can be quite complex as there are many modules that are not easy to handle.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

If they improved the workflow and processes, simplified the initial setup, improved the UI, and the digital workplace catalog for the end-users, then I would give this solution a rating of 10. 

Clients use it for incident management, problem management, change management, and device management.

Automatic orchestration is the most valuable. The feature for designating some cases or incidents to the right PM for resolution, first call resolution, and change management are also important. 

The self-service feature and knowledge base resolutions are helping the customers in resolving issues rather than opening tickets.

It can have more features for hardware discovery and hardware information.

The integration with IQ operations management should be streamlined. ITSM and ITOM should be more integrated, and there should be better integration from Helix Discovery to Helix CMDB. There were some issues regarding this integration, and they were difficult to resolve in big environments. We have a lot of devices and users to manage. Therefore, the integration should be better.

I have been selling this solution since version 7, that is, for five years to seven years.

There is some difficulty in configuring high reliability and disaster recovery. Sometimes, the solution is not available for end users. The infrastructure must be configured in a certain way to keep it online most of the time. There are no bugs or issues.

It is scalable horizontally and vertically. The problem is that you have to use a lot of servers and server infrastructure to scale it. You need a really big infrastructure to manage and sustain ITSM. Most of our clients are big companies. 

They solved the problem most of the time. I would rate them a nine out of ten. It would be good to have Brazilian support. Currently, you have to talk to engineers in the US, India, and other countries. We don't have local support, and we have to work with a partner.

It was complex. The older versions were complex to customize and create some workflows. It took a lot of time to deploy. I don't know about the latest versions.

It is too expensive for a small business.

I would advise others to prepare and plan a lot before using the product. Define the exact workflows, themes, and end-user experience because the users sometimes don't use self-service. Customize it as little as possible.

I would rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of ten.

We are not using this product. Rather, we are proposing it as a part of our solution because we have experience with the on-premise and the ROE (remedy on demand). We upgrade and do the installation for our customers.

What I have found to be the most valuable is that it offers the radius deployment package not only to the BMC cloud but also to the public cloud such as Azure. You can also deploy it to a private cloud.

The Helix platform is not restricted to the ITSM. It has the capability to do the workflow management, the digital workplace, the discovery, and the monitoring. 

If you want to have to migrate from on-premises to Helix or from Helix to a ServiceNow, or from cloud to on-premises, it's easy but it requires additional tools. It should be included in the existing package, rather than clients having to go with a third-party tool. It could be offered to customers as a value on a separate line item.

There are some companies that provided a customized solution to identity what customization has been done, and to reduce the number of your upgrade cycle. If they had this type of solution included, it would be helpful.

In the next release, I would like to see AI used for classification or categorization.

I have been working with this solution since it's was launched, which has been a couple of years.

It's a stable solution.

It's easy to scale.

I belong to a larger enterprise. With this solution, you can go from smaller organizations to a large enterprise.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy. Within a few hours, you are up and running.

It's straightforward to install and configure it.

Pricing on the licensing depends on how you want to position it. If you are looking for some kind of professional services form the OEM then you would have to purchase that.

When you evaluate other products they all have their pros and cons.

The cost differs, as well as some of the functionalities.

I recommend this solution and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

This tool is used for ticketing purposes, to track down daily issues and requests as part of business requirements.

It includes ITIL practices such as incident management, problem management, change management, asset management, and configuration management. We are able to link tickets to one another.

It is used to create, modify, update, and resolve tickets. Parent/child tickets are possible to create. It can also create problem tickets and change requests. It will easily calculate SLAs and can create and customize reports as per user requirement. 

This product has helped us to maintain our OLAs (Organisation level Agreements) and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) by tracking incidents, requests, problem records, and change requests, all in the form of tickets.

We can easily check the progress of these tickets and follow up with the respective teams.

It provides us the facility to maintain a KEDB (Knowledge database), which is indeed very beneficial for day to day activities.

It can easily add notes to every ticket with the status update.

For us, this tool is essential for ticketing purposes.

The most valuable feature is the linking of parent and child tickets. When there are major issues, through the help desk, multiple tickets are raised for the same issue. This allows us to segregate it by parent or child tickets and link the child tickets to the parent.

It's easy to calculate the SLA as it provides the timing as to when the ticket was raised, and the clock automatically stops when the ticket is on pending status. Thus, at the time of resolution, it provides the SLA, whether the ticket met the SLA or not.

To raise any ticket, there are too many fields to be filled and it makes generating tickets very time-consuming. Some fields should take data automatically; for example, ticket routing to the teams after entering the team's respective CI (Configuration Item). This will save time and creating tickets would be faster. 

The GUI looks a bit complex and can be much better.

When generating reports, there are limited options to customize as per user requirement. It is in need of better customization so that these requirements can be satisfied.

We have been using BMC Helix ITSM for six years.

It is the enterprise ticketing system at KU Health Systems. We use it for incident management, asset management, knowledge management, problem management, release management, and change management. There are also several tools, such as SCCM, and other integration solutions (e.g., TLS) which ingest the data and give the executives a flash dashboard to look at. The idea is to reduce downtime and expedite recovery time.

It has made some improvements. However, it also created more layers of bureaucracy. I like the segregation of duties. I like narrowing the focus of each module, and having independent teams working on specific tasks. What I do not care about is having "Module Owners", which serve as a lead on the module instead of having a Remedy administrator/developer.  

Now that Smart IT is rolled out to HR, and more service requests are being developed, we are getting to the point of automation and self-service. The idea is reduce the number of tickets related to day-to-day operations, so we can focus on planning.  

Incident Management is easily the most commonly used module that we have. It is helpful knowing the ins and outs of ITIL. 

Smart IT and the phone app are easily the most valuable features in reporting and tracking ongoing issues.

Most On Demand customers can tell you the daily struggles. There are some bugs which magically fix themselves. 

We also have experienced outages, because some other customers did something on the same cluster that we share.