BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

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.

The primary use case of this solution for individuals calling into the help desk to have a ticket created over the phone, which becomes an incident. If the incident gets upgraded then it becomes a problem and then they work on it.

The most valuable feature is knowledge management.

All products can be improved. For this solution, the customization could be improved.

BMC has its own community where we can go in and suggest ideas and changes to the products, which is great, but at times BMC is not very responsive. There have been suggestions that were submitted five years ago and still not delivered. BMC has indicated that it was in development.

They could be more responsive to feedback from their community board.

I have been working with BMC Solutions from Remedy since 1994.

I have used it since it was released.

This solution is stable, it's very good. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten.

This solution is scalable and I think that it's the best that you can get. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The current project has 140 people, which excludes the users. There are approximately 20,000 users for this project. This site is quite large.

I have worked on sites that have a couple of hundred users to many thousands.

This solution is suitable for medium to large-sized companies.

The technical support is very good and I would rate it a nine out of ten.

At times, you have a critical issue and you need an answer very quickly. Even if it takes half an hour or a day to get an answer, it takes longer than you expect.

There is always room for improvement, although BMC has improved over the last couple of years.

I have worked with other competing products for integrations. I focus on BMC solutions.

The initial setup is complex. If you know what you are doing and what you want then it's straightforward. Most clients don't know what they want and it becomes complex.

I have worked with three or four consultants where you have small teams, and I have worked on larger teams where there is a huge undertaking to implement it.

I implement this solution for my clients.

BMC Helix is a marketing term. The name changed from BMC Remedy ITSM to BMC Helix a few years ago. It's also linked to BMC's CMDB, where they have an image of all of the assets in the company.

In BMC, you can do absolutely anything. You can customize, you can configure, and you can customize and develop pretty much anything.

It might take some time and it may have some consequences later on when you are upgrading and you want to install a newer version, especially when you are on-premises.

Other solutions may have a better BEB Cloud interface or better sales organization, but BMC is a trustworthy company and they keep their promises. Some other competitors make promises but don't always honor them.

My advice to others would be the following:

1. Get a support contract directly with BMC. 
2. Pick your BMC partner or reseller.
3. Get in-house resources and knowledge, and train your employees, or employ someone with the BMC Remedy skills.
4. Get external contractors to top it up with contractors and consultants from the partner.
5. Set up a good project team that communicates with BMC contract partners, your employees, and the contractor.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

I am supporting the top bank in Pakistan, and they are using BMC Helix ITSM. There are multiple solutions in BMC Helix ITSM, such as asset management, configuration management, and tools that are used for monitoring purposes.

The solution can perform well for large-sized companies.

The documentation could improve in BMC Helix ITSM.

I have been using BMC Helix ITSM for approximately eight months.

I rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of ten.

We have three to four people using this solution.

The solution is best suited for enterprises.

I rate the scalability of BMC Helix ITSM a seven out of ten.

 I rate the support from BMC Helix ITSM a five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup of BMC Helix ITSM requires a technical expert. An expert is required for the configuration and management of the different servers.

The price of BMC Helix ITSM is expensive.

I rate BMC Helix ITSM a seven out of ten.

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.