BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

The primary use case was basic ITIL/ITSM.

It replaced an older system, called ManageNow. It had no major impact on the way we operated. We more or less continued, we had a well-performing organization, so it really didn't change much. Everything we had in ManageNow, we had in BMC Remedy, including basic incident management, event management, based on monitors spread around our environment.

It was a full-featured product. Based on my experience where I was responsible for Remedy, and for a later project where I worked on a very sophisticated implementation of BMC Remedy, it is full-featured and could do almost anything that you can think of in the ITIL portfolio.

BMC Remedy has more features now than I know about and have used, so it would be presumptuous for me to try to suggest improvements for a future release.

What I do find is that, compared to ServiceNow, BMC Remedy is somewhat "closed." I can go to the ServiceNow website and learn everything there is to know about the product, and training is available. That really wasn't available with BMC Remedy.

However, if I'm working with a client who wants to expand and move into other areas - they want to expand their workflow and other parts of the organization, they want to do some work with project management, they want to do some work with HR - I'm not sure that BMC Remedy is doing that. And it's because of their platform. Any software has a lifecycle. To me, BMC is a dated architecture. I wish them well but I don't see how they're going to keep going, long-term, without a total rewrite and coming out with a new system.

BMC Remedy is good. It's solid. I don't remember ever having any stability problems with it.

I didn't see any limits. I worked with one client who had, to me, what seemed like a lot of servers. They had some 25,000 servers. They had a lot of BMC workflows. They had a lot of users on the system. I never really got a full feel for how many, based on what I was doing, but I saw no scalability issues. ServiceNow and BMC Remedy scale about equally.

There were times when we needed to talk with BMC service support, and we got good response. It was something that we paid for, but we got good response.

The old system was at the end of its lifecycle, it was being phased out. The name of it was ManageNow, and I don't know that it exists anymore. It was very old and BMC Remedy was a step up, in the right direction, to a modern system.

When selecting a vendor it depends on the client. In my case, I was selecting for a client and BMC Remedy was the best available at the time. We did an evaluation of all the vendors, and BMC Remedy was the best. That was eight years ago.

Initial setup was like any other similar implementation. There are certain things that you have to do, tables that you have to build, configurations that you have to work with. There are a few modifications that you have to make so that it fits into your environment. We tried to stay as close as we could to the out-of-the-box solution. So it was fairly straightforward.

There are portions of BMC Remedy that are proprietary. One of those was attachments. If I attached an image, if I attached a project plan, if I attached a screen print, getting those out was very difficult when we moved servers to ServiceNow. So if you're not planning on moving, it's not an issue. It's when you move it the issue.

ServiceNow is expanding. If I were just choosing an ITSM system right now, it would be hard to choose, if you ignored the underlying platform. BMC Remedy is very old. It has a very old infrastructure. So if I ignored that, and the "openness" issue, it would be very hard to choose between BMC and Service Now.

I would rate at nine out of 10. It did what we wanted it to do. We had some issues, but we caused those issues by the way we implemented it. I found that BMC training and BMC availability for learning how the system worked and for answering questions - if it wasn't in their manual, it was very difficult to get that information. You had to pay, it wasn't open. It was a "closed" environment. If it had been much more open, so I could get into understanding everything, that would have been better.

In terms of advice, if you're working for a large company on an ITSM solution, where you're talking about incidents, problems, change, knowledge, there are three, maybe four vendors. I would say look at those very hard, learn what you can, and make the best decision for your organization. It's a limited market.

Aligning IT processes within your organization with best practices, like ITIL.

Having all the processes, fields, and settings already setup out-of-the-box, thus minimizing implementation time.

Our organization already had another solution, therefore there were no issues accepting such a solution. However, the ease of use and integration made it a worthwhile investment, since we did some integrations with other tools making our lives easier.

• Service request management: Ease and speed of creating new requests. 
• Ease of integration: There are plenty of integration options, e.g., web services, email, RESTful API, and even an ETL tool, Pentaho, which helps a lot.

The amount of software issues are still too big, even considering the complexity of the tool. Whenever you start exploring some new product features, you run into defects. It has been like this for the last six years.

Support could be more skilled. We are wasting too much of our time debugging.

Managing our customer products, problems, and take-ons as well as our IT  operations and change management. We also use it to manage our ever growing infrastructure.

The MyIT product has given our end users a much better perception of Remedy and made the product look more fluid. This has made people more likely to log calls rather than do work offline allowing us to get a better picture of what is going happening on a daily basis and monitor trends correctly.

MyIT is simple to use and its mobility is a big plus for our on the go users.

SmartIT could include PR. This would help us greatly in bridging the gap between Remedy's views and SmartIT. We would love to see this feature in the near future.

From time to time, but I think that is our fault due to extra processes that we implemented to fit our business needs.

No issues.

Its mostly great. Sometimes, it takes a little while on the more complex issues, but generally it is fast.

HEAT. It was a dated product with limitations.

At first, the setup was complex, but we have evolved since then.

We implemented in-house. Our whole team is well-seasoned in Remedy.

It is costly, but it is well worth it. Just make sure you really sit down and look at what you will be using per user, therefore you will not be surprised with a big bill. You do not want every user having every license, it really is not needed.

We did not. We went to Remedy because we knew it was the way to go.

Give it a try. Demos are easy to come by. Speak to others using the product. If you are a medium or enterprise business, it is a great value.

• A lot more alignment with ITIL
• Better customer experience
• Better reporting abilities
• Less failed changes

• Change management and impact analysis
• Central management of Prod Cats and Op Cats

• Easier upgrade path
• Easy to customize
• Avoid all browser cache issues
• Less infrastructure requirements

Yes.

Yes.

They are quick to respond, but could be a bit more helpful.

BMC Remedy ITSM suite solution was chosen to replace the existing ITSM tool. The existing tool was lagging in functionality and not addressing our business requirements. The Remedy tool was very much aligned to ITIL and had the industry experience for significant number of years. BMC also has very other products which help in achieving better service management.

It takes a long-time to plan and deploy the on-premise solution.

We use Remedy to automate the ticket registration, attention, and solution from automatic creation to solve them on mobile devices. 

This product helps us to better serve our customers, enabling them anyplace for making requests or updating tickets.

The mobile features are the best part of the new version. It is easy to be notified and update your work from a mobile, which is great. Also, the option to review reports and dashboards from the mobile.

Maybe the upgrade process and the release between environments should to be more transparent for anyone to execute it.

To manage the ITSM process in our organization and the organization's infrastructure via CMDB.

I have implemented and worked on this product at many customer sites. The way you can customize this product to adapt to the process the customer is already using is what sets this apart from other ITSM products out there. This helps customers to adapt to the tool pretty quickly.

The versatility and customizability of the product is what I like most. It provides a strong customization platform in the AR System.

The interface is one major complaint about this product. With the recent introduction of Digital Workplace and SmartIT products. I think BMC is finally going in the right direction on that front.

ITIL implementation in a corporate 100 technology company.  

Implemented the following:

• Service Desk
• Knowledge Management
• Problem management
• Asset Management
• Service Level Management
• Service Request Management.

Now, we have MyIT and SmartIT implemented, which have a significantly improved UI.

The service desk (incident management) function is the lion's portion of use and value. It has been instrumental in aligning our service desk with the ITIL fundamentals and continuously improving the operating metrics of that area.

The interface is somewhat dated as compared to technologies in use today. They have made steps towards addressing that, but they are still limited in being able to allow the customer to truly extend the UI. In the next releases, they should continue the work with the updated interfaces and extend the toolset so the customer can make more flexible changes to the UI (within reason).  

Provide documentation on the content of the REST API interfaces. Right now, it is pretty much non-existent.

The product that was replaced was a homegrown service desk app. We replaced that with Remedy ITSM, which has streamlined our management and routing of service requests. This has reduced the amount of time taken for ticket resolution. We have seen year over year customer satisfaction improvement for the last five years.

• Logging of incidents
• Work orders
• Purchase orders and change requests

We use this to track all future development requests from our end users.

Provides a clean front-end for our users to log requests and has rich ITSM functionality.

MyIT application for logging and following up of requests. It is much more functional than the old SRM request application. 

The Approval Central system needs to be refreshed. 

It would also be beneficial if there was a text-based editor for the workflow rules instead of using the developer studio, which adds a lot of time when developing quick solutions to problems.

No issues.

No issues. 

Customer support is always fantastic and willing to help. No matter what time of day we have a problem. We always get a friendly, helpful support engineer to guide us through any small challenges that we face.

HEAT. We changed due to the rich functionality offered by BMC Software.

Initial, out-the-box setup was easy with no problems. The gathering of business data to import into the system was more complex.

At first, we used a vendor and then moved it in-house.

Not sure at this moment, as we have not been asked to provide that to the business.

Yes, FrontRange by HEAT.

Look at cloud-based hosting to a provide a stable, easily expandable solution. We found on-premise did have a few challenges.

With a proper well laid out project plan and some good developers, this solution is able to meet any requirements that your organization may have.