BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

We use Remedy as our ITIL solution for our IT department. Currently, we have a few projects starting up, which will also utilize it as a ticket intake system for non-IT as well.

Our Change Management and Incident Management processes have been greatly improved by using Remedy. It has allowed us to standardize and streamline both processes immensely.

Currently, the Service Catalog has the most value to it. Mainly, because we are able to offer IT functionality to non-IT people. This also helps to cut down calls and emails to the Service Desk by routing things automatically via the catalog.

We found that there was numerous issues upgrading from 8.1 to 9.1 in that all our licenses were broken for almost a year and a half. We chased down a total of 14 hotfixes, patches, and service packs before things were finally resolved.  During that time, said "fixes" also broke other things, so it was quite the sore spot with management for some time.

We understand this occurred mainly because the Dev team rewrote the entire code from scratch to remove the spaghetti code.  However, in doing so, they really broke quite a few things which left not only us, but numerous companies, in dire straights for quite some time.

I highly recommend that more QA be done on a product like this, especially after a complete rewrite, to make sure things are working properly. I can't imagine what it was like in version 9.0.

I am an administrator and developer of BMC Remedy ITSM Suite. I create service requests, templates, and do day-to-day admin duties. I also create customizations due to requests or business needs.

We were using outdated applications and spreadsheets. Now, with service requests, we have been able to give visibility to the business users.

Service Request Management was the first big win for our company. We are currently implementing Change Management and look forward to seeing more benefits.

Smart Reporting was added, then was purchased from another vendor. We have little ability to customize and correct issues due to this. 

I would also love to see consistency across all consoles.

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) as a service level process use. I use the reporting console to make reports for managers.

Reports have helped us to improve our IT processes. The main benefit is providing the right information to our decision-makers.

From a business point of view, it is important to have a tool that is scalable and has the possibility to modify reports of different indicators. This functionality has improved significantly.

Maybe it could be more simplified and easier to change the reporting point of view, like from a different vendor to another.

• ITSM features
• CR creation

It helped us to implement ITIL and MSTOP.

• Slow BI

I have used it for four years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues, as it offers a cloud-based solution.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is average.

Technical support is 10/10.

I previously used a different solution. I switched because my organization switched the tool vendor.

We implemented it through a vendor team.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE Service Manager.

I have no further comments; excellent tools.

It's easy to customize and provides a range of features you can customize with practically no exceptions unlike its competing products like ServiceNow, etc. which have many limitations.

I have implemented this product at many customer sites and have been able to do so with an extremely quick turnaround. The development and customization timelines on the calendar were insignificant compared to the time needed to collect business requirement which is usually the constant and tool agnostic. No matter what solution you pick, understanding business requirements is a constant.

I can’t quite think of any areas that may require improvement – web services maybe as until v8 there was one small limitation which I think has been removed with the v9. It was possible to circumvent the limitation in previous versions by rewriting the WSDL.

We've been using BMC Remedy AR System and its ITSM suite products for about 17 years.

Not once in any of my deployments for the past 17 years. Bugs and issues like that yes, but nothing that was not resolved as quickly as it was found.

Just in a couple of releases after which they had to immediately release a SP to resolve those stability issues.

Scalability is one of BMC Remedy systems biggest strengths..

Fairly good. Much of it is in Asia and as in with most foreign customer support there is that occasional “understanding the accent” problem, but apart from that they are fairly good at what they do.

It's top notch.

I have had to use ServiceNow in between deployments, and think it is a much inferior solution to the BMC Remedy solution.

As straightforward as it can get for someone who knows the system.

I do the implementations myself.

From a technical viewpoint, I can only say it should be fairly good as you get exactly what they promise you no less. With many other solutions including ServiceNow that have better marketing teams than BMC Remedy does, they set the delivery expectations where they cannot possibly get due to technical limitations with the tool. BMC Remedy representatives however set the bar exactly where it should be and the product is able to deliver what they promise it can.

Since licensing can affect price of the overall solutions significantly especially for smaller businesses, I would recommend those that are interested in this solution to spend a tiny bit on third party applications you get that are designed to work with the BMC solution to monitor its usage and suggest the optimal numbers for licenses based on these statistics. It has been useful for a number of shops to save on their licensing costs significantly by not over budgeting for their licenses. These monitoring apps are legal to use and in fact have been displayed at BMC Remedy user group conferences and even won awards at some of those shows.

I had to evaluate ServiceNow which I feel has a long long way to go. Lucky for them they have invested in a very strong marketing team which has strengthened its product sales

Make sure you get a team that has the know how to implement this product. Like with all other things that are easy to use and easy to implement, it also is easy to muck things up when you have a team that does not know what it is doing. Find the right people, build a good implementation team, and more importantly, spend as much time as you can with the business analysis part making sure you get the implementation team involved in it. Do not sweat on the actual implementation. That part is the easy part once you have your requirements right.

I've found that the complete set of modules very valuable. All the features, including all modules like asset management, incident management, Service Request Management, CMDB, developing the applications using workflow, etc., are really cool.

ARS has helped to automate various business needs to our client. Remedy is used to track our client's asset inventory which has improved the organizational functions a lot.

Upgrading to a higher version should be easier. Also, performance is the factor which needs a lot of improvements. Apart from that all modules need small small enhancements which I believe would have been taken care in higher version as I never used a higher version.

I am using Remedy ITSM solution for last 4 years.

I was never a part of initial deployment. But apart from that small deployments and enhancements keep coming as per business requirement and I never faced any issue.

No issue with stability. I have not found any stability issues.

No, Remedy is best solution to enhance growth of an organization. We have onboarded lot of customers without any issues.

Customer service is good.

7 out of 10. Tech support should be improved. There is lot for BMC to improve their tech support.

No, I never used any other solution. And I find this perfect as well.

I don't know. I was not involved that time, it was long time ago :)

I don't know as I was not available that time.

From customer perspective, more customizable solutions should be available.

From a developer/support personnel perspective, logging should be more friendly.

Licensing and pricing is quite expensive as compared to other competitors but in long run Remedy is the remedy to all business needs.

No. I started my career with Remedy.

To me, I would say this is one of the best solution for Enterprise customers to fulfill their business needs. Be it managing their assets inventory or working through modules. It's quite user friendly as well. However, licensing and deployment may be difficult for the developers and implementers.

For me specifically the Asset Management & Incident Management modules.

Since 8.1 is compatible with the ADDM discovery tool, we automated discovery and mapping of assets (CIs) and their relationships migration to the CMDB. We also used them for building services for the operational dashboard.

Each of the modules in this version have room of improvement. We also have to perform customizations based on our company environment and business needs but it would be nice if these were available by default.

I've been using this version for March 2015, and I was using v6.3 for seven years.

We definitely encountered some issues with the deployment and integration with other tools we are using, but that is the same with the any new tool.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

7/10

7/10

I have been in this company for eight years, and it was already in place.

The initial setup wasn’t straightforward.

We hired Column consulting to work on the development and implementation of the upgrade.

It’s not an easy product to use for the customers.

With so many cool features available in BMC's own applications like ITSM, it's easy to overlook the platform features that enable them. ARS really shines when it's workflow directly supports critical business processes. And it's this workflow - how easily its translated from business process, how quickly it can be developed, and how fast it can be deployed and used - that I consider it's most valuable feature to the business. It has all of the other features you'd expect in a robust enterprise platform (architectural scalability, flexibility to adapt to Windows/Unix shops, tons of UI widgets, a variety of DB options, cloud offerings, etc.) but it's workflow engine is what makes it a great platform for pretty much any business need.

As a platform it provides a way to rapidly develop and deploy a number of small, but important applications. One example of this is how call center quality is evaluated and measured - we use Remedy to track, grade, and ultimately development improvements to the processes, ultimately benefiting the customer.

There are two areas where I think improvements could be made; web support of custom applications and upgrades. BMC provides a couple of modern web interfaces with SmartIT and MyIT, but these are limited to fronting their own (ITSM) applications. Having a modern web layer for custom applications running on the ARS platform would help a lot (indeed there are several very large technology companies who do this for themselves, but having a BMC solution would simplify the DevOps process and associated infrastructure). Upgrading to a new ARS version in a complex environment remains a challenge. It's not that any one part is hard (and BMC has the ability to offer a zero-down-time option), but it's often a manual, long, and time-consuming process. Managing multiple tasks and handling them as part of the installation would simplify things).

We've been using the Remedy Action Request System (ARS) platform by BMC Software, running 100% custom applications (not ITSM). The larger, primary system is running ARS v8.1 and we're in the process of upgrading to ARS v9.1. There's also a smaller system running an older version that's being phased out.

Personally, I've been developing business solutions with the ARS platform for over 20 years. The last couple of environments I've been working have some applications over 10 years old.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with its stability.

BMC has done a good job of keeping ahead of enterprise growth and continues to offer new features that make administration, scaling, and performance tuning all easier to manage.

Fair/Good - In environments as complex as ours, the basic needs are pretty much taken care-of in-house. The issues we generally face are complex and deep within the technology, and these always take a bit of time to bring the vendor up to speed. (To be fair, BMC offers higher support tiers, providing a more bespoke support experience, but I haven't had the opportunity to experience this tier.)

The platform was in place prior to my arrival.

That's more of a question for leadership, but I think that it needs to be compared against custom platforms and evaluated from a total-cost of ownership perspective. There's hard evidence that, while licensing sounds expensive, having the development staff focus on core business process automation rather than low-level platform development/maintenance is a worthwhile trade-off and is a bigger benefit to the business (assuming you treat the AR System platform as such).

Pretty darn good, but nothing's perfect. Know your business, their processes, and how they use other tools - seriously. "Implementation" often is interpreted as focusing on just a software installation, like running setup.exe and watching the blue status bar make it's way to 100%. Frankly the software install is so well defined that it should be automated - and it typically only represents 20-30% of an overall deployment. 80% of an implementation should be spent analyzing, configuring, and testing the various configurations and integrations required by your unique business. Don't forget the training and knowledge transfer! Vendor teams can help (a lot) in guiding you through this, but they don't know your business like you and your customers.

Make sure you think about, and understand the differences between what BMC calls the brand, "Remedy", their application suite, " Remedy IT Service Management", and the platform, "AR System". Calling something "Remedy" without this understanding leads to a lot of confusion.

I like the automation abilities of Remedy, specifically the ability to have templates that also auto-create tasks to be resolved by different teams.

My current organization does not use Remedy, but my last company moved their knowledge base to Remedy and it was simple to navigate and search for articles.

While Remedy is an excellent ticketing system, the knowledge base module needs to be optimized for MITS companies to organize documentation for multiple client organizations.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with its stability.

We were able to scale it for our needs without any issues.

I have no experience on implementing Remedy, but companies who offer RaaS (Remedy as a Service) are able to split the cost of running a ticketing system and aid you in developing it for your organization.

The main valuable feature is the flexibility of the product -- the ability of being able to make it do almost anything we need it to do to adjust to our business needs and to do it very quickly. The time to deliver a finish product is fast.

We have been able to provide several fairly complex and deeply integrated fully customized applications within the different systems throughout the company in an extremely quick delivery time which is impossible with other products.

It has improved the life cycle of the development making it a lot shorter to go from the concept phase (requirements gathering) to the deployment portion.

We also have been able to provide a lot more applications to the businesses within to service them better. Improve their processes by automating a lot of their sticky notes and spreadsheets and other paper trails that they were using prior to the application being created.

I have been developing on ARS platform since 1998, but on this version since 2013.

Like any product/new versions there are always issues. The main ones are the undocumented features that comes with the customized applications. We are not using the out of the box application (ITSM) therefore we are thinking "out of the box" and BMC did not document all of the changes made in their different upgrades. So each time you upgrade from one version to another, you always run into these issues. You need to always make sure you do thorough testing of all the functionality you have in your different applications especially if you are "outside of the box" type of business.

We did and still have stability issues that we are working on. The issues are all linked to the BIRT reporting tool which was the solution recommended at the time by BMC. But we are now totally disconnecting from this tool. We have identify this as being the 100% culprit and are using other methods for doing what is required within our web applications.

But beside the reporting issue no. This is a solid system. We do however have a weekly scheduled reboot of our servers (Windows farm) just to be safe. But that is just because they are Windows :-)

But in all honesty, we need to always keep an eye on the amount of Handles being generated by all the services from the BMC AR System. They do from time to time run out of control and will require you to restart the services. But that is not a regular occurrence.

None. I haven't seen any limitation at all on this product. It is as good as the hardware will allow it to be. you just need to ensure you have the proper hardware/architecture to support what you need.

The Customer service is the same as always. It hasn't changed much. They will always be there to help you find the product to help you grow in your business.

BMC needs to keep improving their support. It is still far from what it was back in the days of Remedy. It is very sad that you still are asked for you logs when the logs are already been provided and that you are asked the same questions when those are already answered in the tickets. It is as if they are reading from a script like drones. They need to learn to be more proactive and less robots. When the tickets being raised already have all the details of the issues, and all the diagnostics have been done by us please send the details to second level or 3rd if necessary instead of asking us to repeat the steps we already repeated. we don't have time to waste, especially when a server is down. That is why we do not use BMC support at the moment.

We have been on BMC AR System platform here since the mid 90s. We keep adding more applications, modifying/updating the old ones.

We have retired some too. It is an easy platform to grow and adapt

I was not at this client site when the implementation was done. But from experience, I would suggest that anyone embarking in this adventure does get at least the basic training

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

I keep a close eye on license usage and balance them. The cost of license is always an issue in every company and needs to be evaluate every Quarter/Year.

A report is provided with the recommendation to each business units on what needs to be done.

BMC ARS was implemented back in mid 1990's . I was not at this client site when the implementation was done.

This is based on the older version of the product as we are slowly moving all our thick client apps to the Web. This has been a pain stacking process due to amount of applications we needed to move and to the multiple of "old" code we had to drag along with us. The next move will be the upgrade to version 9 which will be another huge and exciting step. This is an amazing powerful product, but like any product that has so much multi possibilities, it has its "quirkiness" that you need to learn to work with.