BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

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.  

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.

We use Remedy primarily for Change, Incident and Asset Management. We track all company assets.

It has centralized all work orders and help desk ticket tracking. It enables our entire IT department (approximately 300 people) to "speak the same language" when referring to work loads and projects.

• Smart IT is a great help to the help desk. It allows them to quickly add INC  tickets. 
• Smart Reporting makes it easy to create/publish views for tables, so our customers can easily create their own reports.

Adding additional fields does not work very well. We needed assistance from our vendor support team.

BMC Remedy ITSM application solution is one of the best solutions in the market. This is one of the primary help desk management tool that we have. We use this tool for managing tickets, other employee related services, and reporting purposes.

We reduced many paper processes to electronic driven forms. It helps us a lot in tracking and managing.

Overall, the product is valuable, but we use Incident and SRM the most. We really liked the Smart Reporting tool and also the new mobile apps as add-ons.

If BMC can add and extend the Release Management with ease, it would be great. Also, make customizable/configurable article templates in the Knowledge Management. 

Sometimes, but if you have a solid architecture, then this tool work like a charm.

Never.

Its 50-50, sometimes its great, and other times, not.

The platform was in place prior to my arrival.

Initial setup is straightforward, and if you follow best practices, then future enhancements will be smoother.

The platform was in place prior to my arrival, but we did lot of the things afterwards. When I took over, Remedy was on 7.6, and now, we are on 9.1 with Smart IT running.

If Customer and IT agents are happy, that is one of the greatest ROI. However, one of the major factors is Leadership, because at the end they have to justify the cost.

This solution needs to be in the annual IT budget. Please always get the latest quote from a BMC partner or from BMC. Check for the latest offerings. 

While purchasing, try to negotiate on per user licensing costs, associated maintenance, and purchase 20% more then what you think you should have. Bulk is always cheaper.

The platform was in place prior to my arrival.

Once you have the solution implemented, always follow best practices and have an admin in-house.

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.

The ability to utilise CMDB information is the most valuable feature for us as it helps us to see interlinkages between CIs.

It has improved our issue resolution and change management process.

Desktop client should be an option for heavy users.

We had no issues during the deployment.

We've not experienced any stability issues.

We've had no problem scaling it to our needs.

I've not had to contact technical support.

The initial set-up was straightforward.

We performed the implementation in-house.

Have your business requirements confirmed prior to selecting a vendor.

The most valuable feature is the ability to have ITIL Out Of The Box (OOTB) functionality that can be readily customised to fit the specific needs of any given business organisation. This coupled with the open API that allows for integration with existing and legacy data sets means that you can rapidly implement ITSM in an organic fashion. Another valuable feature has to be the fast prototyping environment with allows an organisation to develop customisations in a reactive, agile manner.

The use of templates, both Incident and Change templates, has allowed for a more consistent approach to processing these types of tickets. Developing a standardised approach to these has also improved the associated reporting for post-Incident and post-Change reviews. Another important improvement has been with the implementation of the Service Request Module which has improved the end-user experience and is helping move towards a more "Self-Help" environment.

The two main areas for improvement are the User Interface and ad-hoc reporting. The User Interface still has the appearance of being clunky and not user friendly. This has changed with the release of Remedy/ITSM V9 and related products such as SmartIT and MyIT. Reporting has always been an issue with the Remedy/ITSM paradigm. It is not user friendly, too limited and clearly not intended for the End User. With Remedy/ITSM V9 comes the SmartReporting module. I look forward to using this in the future.

I have involved with Remedy since 1996. Starting with Version 3.2 of Action Request System and v1 of Helpdesk. This was long before ITSM came onto the scene.

Having been involved in migrations from version 3.2 up to and including v8.1.02 I can honestly say that very few of the migrations have induced deployment issues. The Remedy, and latterly BMC, engineers, have successfully maintained backwards compatibility throughout all their versions. As long as the platform and infrastructure requirements are planned and resourced correctly then the deployment process is relatively straightforward.

Stability is very much dependent on the architecture that has been implemented and also on the underlying infrastructure. For example, with the application server and mid-tier being deployed on a Windows Server environment, I had a client who was experiencing issues with some of the Java processes on a weekly, if not daily basis. Moving to a Linux based environment has almost eliminated these issues.

Scalability is very similar to stability in that as long as the underlying infrastructure is correctly sized and resourced then the product can deal with scalability issues.

Customer Service does vary. It all depends on your Account Manager. The good ones can be a real asset and and can provide that additional effort that makes for a good relationship between all the actors.

Technical support can vary according to your location and which team picks up your issue. Over the years the quality of technical support has varied. Providing you have an administrator/developer who can do some of the initial problem discovery and debugging then you will be able, in conjunction with technical support, to more easily track down the underlying issues.

My existing client used an older version of ITSM from the same supplier. In this case there was no switch from a different solution but the upgrade/migration still needed proper planning to implement correctly. The main reasons for upgrading were to ensure that a currently supported version of the product was being used and that the old infrastructure was replaced by a more performant

For the product itself the initial setup was relatively straightforward. The main complexity arose mainly in the project management aspect of the migration. This was due to the fact the coordination had to be done with both internal and external resources.

The project was undertaken with a vendor team for the installation and migration, internal teams for the architecture and security aspects, as well as the Remedy/ITSM administrators/Process Managers and, of course, the End Users.

As I wasn't involved at the beginning of this project I cannot give any information on the ROI. However, it is clear that ROI improves as and when the relationships between the different modules of ITSM are integrated. Related to this is the integration with other applications within the organisation such as ADDM/Discovery to enhance the CMDB. Once this information is available to, for example, the Incident, Change and Problem modules then the true value of ITSM to the organisation can be realised.

When it comes to pricing and licensing, you have to have a good relationship with your Account Manager. They are the best person to guide you through this important area. You need to analyse your requirements in terms of the ratio of floating/fixed licenses to ensure that you have the correct mix of these licences. Licence and maintenance costs may be relatively high but in terms of upgrades you tend to get a good ROI.

For this particular project no other options were chosen. A SaaS option was not suitable for this client and the requirements of being able to migrate/access the data from the existing environment did not allow for other solutions to be discussed.

This solution is a complex one which does allow for flexibility and customisations. Clients should therefore be aware that there is a need for in-house administrators/developers. This may be reduced if the SaaS option is selected.

Flexibility in development and the capacity of being used by so many different kind of businesses are the most valuable features for us.

It enhances the implementation of process between teams in a central way, and if that is not possible it makes the integration with other applications easily.

There is a lack of features to help the support team in supporting this application. Anything that help to understand the workflow would be very appreciated. Having a "big picture" of a solution is a great way to solve any issue. Something that allows the "navigation" in the workflow (step-by-step), would be fantastic.

We've used Remedy for 17 years and five years for ITSM.

There were no issues with the deployment

It has a problem with the memory management. It's the biggest problem from my point of view.

It has a problem with the memory management. It's the biggest problem from my point of view.

3/10 - customer service is very painful. It takes a lot of time to pass the issue to the technical support and until that happens, the issue jumps between the people in support, that ask us always the some things.

The technical service is OK.

I have always worked with this product, but the company where I work, has a lot of others products similar to this one, and along the years are converting for this one. So, for me, this is evidence of the quality of the product.

For the needs that my company have the structure is complex, and so the setup is a little complex to, but if you only need one server, the setup is straightforward.

In the many years I have experienced both situations. My advice is to have a vendor team so they can validate everything in the setup.

Very dificult to talk about ROI in financial terms. Taking into account that the main concern is to choose the best delivery for a service, we are very happy with this product, and the feeling is that it pays for it self.

The final product has an installation with many modules, so choose carefully according to what your needs are. If you have something simple and if you know how to develop, the price of getting this product will decrease a lot.

It has seamless integration with third-party products.

Improved IT service desk and change management functions within the organization.

On the Administration activity to be more user friendly in terms of capturing logs also more features to be included in development activity.

It's been 11 years now.

We had some issues but we have overcome all those.

We had some issues but we have overcome all those.

We had some issues but we have overcome all those.

It's very good.

It's very good.

I've never used any other solution in my career.

The implementation. was easy.

We did it in-house.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, which allows us to customize it per our customers' requirements.

• Email Notification that are triggered as and when there is an update on assigned ticket, unassigned ticket, pending, and resolved.
• Multiple mailbox configurations helped people from different organizations to communicate/create incidents.

As of now, the new release of version 9 is in place which is resolving the issues reported related to Reporting, Change Management, Approval Console, Dashboards.

I've used it for almost 9 years now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Customer service is a 9 out of 10.

Technical support is a 9 our of 10.

The system on our end is home-grown, which is used for consulting mostly to online and remote clients.

I think that the ROI is perfect with the pricing/licensing concept.

You can implement it with customizations per your requirements as it's a flexible product.

BMC products have been built over the years to make them highly stable and scalable, inline with the ITIL best practice.

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.

BMC Software provides ETL tools that support seamless integration and data load activities, reducing the timelines to deliver.

ETL tools have helped automating the foundation data, CI and SLM data load process significantly reducing daily manual task.

SRM helped fast track On-boarding of Employees and fulfilment of user request.
BMC Remedy on-demand framework is highly scalable to support on boarding of more than 400 Customers at a time.

BMC Remedy applications like IM, PM, CM, AM are extremely robust and are fundamental to provide support for IT infrastructure.

Did come across few hiccups around some product documentation not available or not very useful or not enough support available or may be a utility not working as desired, however, these were not show stoppers and we managed to work our way around these. I will recommend good fall back in terms of very well documented products and utilities, and strong technical support.

At times, some consoles, forms are loaded with too much information and for the user it can get confusing, suggest take "Less is more" approach and make them intuitive and easy to use.

I have been implementing, customizing and integrating BMC products for the past 10 years.

Deployment issues have been encountered like compatibility issues of ITSM and SLM. Similarly issues of installing Analytics with BO on Red hat Linux platform.

BMC products are quite stable.

BMC products are quite scalable.

Customer service and technical support is exceptionally good in some cases and will certainly need improvements in some areas of concern. For ex. When we were trying to resolve issues regarding installation of BO on Red Hat, support from third party Vendor was very poor, and Customer was really concerned about the progress of installation.

None other than BMC remedy.

Initial setup is quite straightforward. You follow all the steps recommended and voila, you system is ready for use.

We had an in-house team for implementation.

For any project to be successful, everything should be meticulously planned and executed. Communication and collaboration with all the stakeholders is essential. Requirements and scope should be well defined and documented. Solution design should be optimal. One needs a great team with appropriate skill set for implementation. Check points should be well defined and system should be thoroughly tested before handing it over to the Customer. Post deployment support and documentation are important for smooth transition.

• Configuration Management – to track hardware, software, users
• Change Management – manage and maintain the company schedule of activities and resources

This product aided in the management of hardware, software, resources, and implementation schedules. Additionally, it opened the communication barriers for resources and management to communicate one on one or in a group tracking and utilizing the facts

The company has used it for 11 years, and I have used it as an implementer & manager for four and a half years. I have also used is personally as an end-user for a further seven years.

When I was a part of the support and upgrade team, it took 120 constant hours to upgrade. 

The data was slow and the BMC support was lacking. 

After the five day upgrade we then had days of data clean up.

We were using a very old product called PMSD, and excel spreadsheets. It was not robust nor did it provide the endless types of functionality that Remedy offered.

The initial setup for all involved was “discovery” as no one had the experience of the tool.

Our internal team performed the hardware configuration and setup, software process and procedures, documentation and training. Our teams were technically strong and had good technical knowledge. They knew the company and this is what made our implementation successful.

I cannot comment as I was not monitoring the ROI. 

I do know that managing the configuration items aided in the upcoming annual contracts for hardware, software products and other configuration items, the data was extremely helpful.

We evaluated several tools – I cannot remember them as it’s been a while. We had a PRB team and performed site visits and demos.

It’s a great product, I would highly recommend it. My strong advice is to take your time to plan, understand your company, and design your processes with your team members to understand all aspects. You also need to schedule your time and implementation. Finally, understand that it’s teamwork, and without that no-one will be successful.

The ease of installation and configuration is valuable. It's quick to build prototypes and full-fledged, database-based applications.

Product consultants who assist and maintain the product for customers.

It needs to be web based. The product also needs a client native (non web) version re-introduced.

I've been using the AR System for 20 years.

I've had no issues deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

It's excellent.

It's excellent.

There was no previous solution in place.

The initial setup is partially complex, but reading the install manual ahead of time is recommended to offset the complexity.

We are a consulting firm that assist our customer based in this area.

Its integration and development capacity. Its ease of use and implementation, assuming you have hired the right kind of resources for that.

It’s a perfect tool to track any kind of event or service. Developing workflow within this application is quick (again with the right resources) and for the most part I have experienced trouble free runs with this product in live environments.

As a developer and a architect, there is very little I might feel a need for to do what I need to do for 99% of the cases. I may wish however for this product to mature a little more on the web front-end which I believe it has on version 9 which I am yet to be exposed to. Also, I would wish for it to remove a limitation I came across with in the past (2 versions ago) on web services on some constructs that the Remedy Web service engine does not handle all too well without modifying the WSDL itself.

Over 17 years ever since it was Remedy Corporation right though its acquisition by Peregrine and then BMC Software.

We had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues with the scalability.

Customer Service could use some improvement – while they are technically very good, some of the agents have poorer communication skills than others.

I have seen other solutions like ServiceNow which is cheaper than Remedy, but I did not feel that it had the same robust capabilities as the BMC Remedy product.

It's straightforward for someone who knows what he or she is doing.

I have implemented this product at multiple sites.

Remedy has third-party vendor products, some of them even free that can help you manage licensing costs through usage monitoring.

It might cost a few more bucks than its competitors like ServiceNow, but it certainly has a better technological edge over ServiceNow. I have heard of some shops that moved from Remedy to ServiceNow to take advantage of ServiceNow's smaller TCO, but then had several issues and problems with being able to successfully implement and use ServiceNow exactly how they would have wished to use it. Remedy has a motto of your business your way which is very fitting since that is exactly what it gives you.

The reporting feature is valuable as we can generate any reports as per our needs provided the search functionality is known. Never worked on the customization or configuration part of the tool as it is limited to the admin role.

Email option was available in the newer version that helped with track and trace. Most of the time it helped a lot during contract renewals.

There are certain functions, such as status, which changes based on the email and last action taken by individual. Anyone can easily manipulate this functionality.

I've used it for five years.

There have been no issues with deploying it.

It freezes sometimes.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

I have used HP Quality Center but I feel tracking and tracing is easier in this tool.

Simple but the installation file is too big.

So far this is the best tool that I have used. The user interface is not difficult to understand.

• CMDB is very useful and it is used to manage client and non-client CI
• Freedom to use your ow way to integrate other systems with BMC Remedy
• Not too difficult to customize workflows

Using Service Request Management creates a Change Request and then sends, via a web service, a request to start a job on VMware to automatically create a server. When the job is finished and server is created it send back the name of the server back to remedy and automatically creates the CI in CMDB and create relationships. In this way we created an automatically way of requesting a server.

In 8.1.02 the Atrium core in the Midtier should be improved. It is using flex technology which is not so reliable. I think in v9 it was changed the technology.

I have been using this product for almost eight years.

There were no major issues with the deployment.

There have been no major issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

The first level is not so skilled . If you manage to go to second level they are good.

There was no previous solution in place.

It was a complex one, because our company was bought by another one and both companies had different versions of remedy installed which needed to be unified. The complexity was from the level of customizations each instance of Remedy needed.

We did it via a vendor. It would be good to create a knowledge in hour which knowledge should be transferred from the vendor side.

I'm not involved in this area.

The BMC Remedy products are reliable and cover all the ITIL processes. An advice would be to try to keep as low as possible the level of customizations.

In recent releases they introduced OOTB email tickets creation. In the older version we needed to write a lot of code for this.

CMDB & Asset management is very helpful in locating an asset. Also, the CI viewer helps in good impact analysis for a CR. Bmc SIM gives a good model too.

The SRM module is still pretty complex, this needs some improvement in AIF creation and configuration. Process designer needs some good video demos and documentation.

I have been working on this product for the last 10+ years.

During code deployment the Ar Server sometimes leaks a lot of memory which needs a regular restart.

Stability is as good as your defined architecture which is decided by load.

Horizontal scalability at AR server level and at mid tier level is very good.

Technical support has improved compared to six or seven years ago. Customers are happy.

The set-up is pretty easy.

Most of my implementations were done through an house team.

Get floating licenses if your user base is going to be big.

I evaluated ServiceNow as an alternative solution. Many customers wanted a new tool to evaluate because they have a very old version of Remedy and upgrading is complex because too much customization is needed. Also, ServiceNow has a very good SAAS/PAAS solution.

Keep a balance between your ITIL processes and the tool. Don't break the costly product just to incorporate your old legacy process. When implementing it, you should avoid customising it too much, having complex SRM AIF forms. You should also ensure you don't have a customised approval process and having too much data in the CMDB.

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.