Helix ITSM has several great features. One of them is the chatbot — the artificial intelligence solution that BMC has. Secondly, Digital Workplace Advanced is important for the end-users — it provides great flexibility. Also, the end-users can manage all requirements and all of the information that they need related to IT services. The chatbots are also integrated with this. The workflow solution is another great feature for the end-users, as part of the engine. It has the power to automatize several different tasks in the ITSM world.
In fact, BMC had a business workflow — this is a solution that is out of the ITSM environment. This solution helps you solve business-related problems. You can automatize a lot of activities related to human resources, finances, production, and so on. It's very useful, it's another feature to emphasize. The presence of BMC in the market of ITSM has been around for more than 20 years. The maturity of ITSM processes has been very good. I think it's excellent. In fact, over the past several years, BMC has begun changing the idea of interfaces for end-users, users of ITSM, and IT people.
Nowadays, the interface is very modern, clear, and practical. It's very easy to use. The user interface is one of the best features. Also, it has a very advanced model of reporting. It's very powerful when it comes to managing metrics, in order to manage APIs. This process is constantly improving. In this arena, I think BMC has very good solutions.
Some parts of the solution are using the old interface — the contracts and contract management part of the solution. It needs to mature a little further in order to become more user-friendly. BMC has been a leader for several years now. In fact, it's a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, along with ServiceNow. I believe BMC is actually on par with ServiceNow in terms of critical capabilities. For this reason, I don't see many areas for improvement.
BMC not only has ITSM solutions, but it also has solutions for asset management — they are really powerful. Discovery, for instance, is a very good solution. It complements ITSM because it's autodiscovery. It's very powerful in terms of discovering all assets connected to the network and the cloud. This capability not only shows all of your infrastructures and relationships in mass, but the connection with CMDB is very strong. It takes all of the information that has already been discovered and transfers it to CMDB. From an ITSM perspective, you can manage your CMDB and the construction of different services more efficiently because all of the information is updated and the relationships between assets are clear.
When you have to use ITSM processes, you can assign incidents, requests, or changes for the right assets. For instance, in the case of a change in management, you can perform a very efficient impact analysis. This is another reason why Discovery is a very good complement to the ITSM solution. Of course, I am mentioning this as a complement to the ITSM environment, but all the solutions are related and work together very efficiently.
Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give BMC Helix ITSM a rating of eight.
Hi there,
I could not resist but comment on this part of what you mentioned :-)
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The best part about these products is that it can be easily twisted and tweaked without compromising any of the underlining fundamental components, adding immense value to customers, vendors and partners.
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Basically there are unlimited customizations and configurations possible in BMC Remedy product. BUT please do note that customizations are NOT supported by BMC.
Be quite careful about customizations and don't perform these in a way where BMC can take a stand against them! Ensure you fit that within their guidelines as much as possible.
If you do some out of the ordinary customizations and then run into some issue, BMC Support will take a stand that this is all due to your customizations and hence they can do nothing about it.
There will be occasions when your way of customization will actually unearth a product deficiency or defect. It takes a lot of hard work to prove that to BMC though.
To be fair, such experience isn't unique to only BMC. Any other products if heavily customized, the vendor is likely to take similar stand.
Sometimes you can run into very peculiar situations and in that case unless you have premier support, the solution can be painful (if you have premier support, pain is less but cost is high!).
This can happen especially in larger projects where there is rapid high volume deployment activity that pushes customizations from one environment of Remedy to the other. Say you are importing a large form (such as HPD:HelpDesk) but in between there is momentary network connection loss or at the same time AR Server times out or crashes due to something else...You will run into heck of an issue in such case and it is very hard to resolve.
These are rare situations and will really test you as well as whoever from BMC support is interacting with you.
OOTB (Out Of The Box) is fairly straight forward and has less issues but hardly any organization can use OOTB product as it is without changes - over a period definitely changes will happen. BMC makes it their selling proposition that their product is highly customizable. But same customization can become a thorn for you later if due precaution is taken.