BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

It is basically in for the management and problem management.

The standards and the framework that it follows are most valuable. It has an ITIL and out-of-the-box framework.

Certain features can be improved. We find ourselves having to make a lot of customizations to make things work for us.

They should add some of the bolt-ons into the initial setup, such as chat.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is reasonably good.

It is scalable.

Their technical support is pretty good.

It was quite complex from memory. It was over three years ago, but it was quite complex.

We did evaluate other options. There were business reasons for choosing BMC over other providers.

I would advise making sure that you have the expertise to administer the system.

I would rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of 10.

I'm a service management specialist and I'm in partnership with BMC.

I like the digital workplace, it's an appealing feature for me. 

One of the issues with the solution is the requirement to provide a lot of information in order to log a request. I'm not talking about end users, technicians or engineers need to provide too much information to initiate a work order or an incident. It doesn't flow; access should require minimal effort. They should consider using ITIL principles and not just IT. 

The initial setup required an engineer for configuration, to load data on the system. The datasheet form isn't user friendly, a client wouldn't be able to fill it in, a tech savvy person is required.

I like the tools BMC offers but it's very expensive.  The pricing model needs to be revisited.

BMC is definitely not for small businesses, especially those in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. It's difficult to get small businesses onto BMC because of the cost. For functionality, I would give this solution an eight out of 10 but I have a serious problem with the pricing and that brings my rating down to a six.

Overall, within our company, there are over 15,000 end-users and 400 incident management members using this solution.

You can do some customizing if you want, which is great. It's a very integrated solution. You have incident management, change management, release management, and asset management — all of these things work very well together.

Their customer service catalog (where a customer can order some products) could be improved. This product is not the best, but they are working on it.

It needs to be more comfortable for the end-user. You need to be able to order some products.

I have been using this solution for over ten years.

This solution is very stable.

It's very easy to scale. You can connect one server to another and scale them together if you want.

We have a support partner that handles all of our BMC support-related issues.

For us, the initial setup was complex because we needed a lot of customization done.

We have a team of four staff members, including myself, who look after all maintenance-related issues.

I would absolutely recommend BMC Helix ITSM. There are two solutions to look out for: BMC and ServiceNow. I think both solutions are great solutions but I can't say which one is better.

For a smaller company, a solution like JIRA Help Desk may be better. BCM can be quite complex as there are many modules that are not easy to handle.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

If they improved the workflow and processes, simplified the initial setup, improved the UI, and the digital workplace catalog for the end-users, then I would give this solution a rating of 10. 

Clients use it for incident management, problem management, change management, and device management.

Automatic orchestration is the most valuable. The feature for designating some cases or incidents to the right PM for resolution, first call resolution, and change management are also important. 

The self-service feature and knowledge base resolutions are helping the customers in resolving issues rather than opening tickets.

It can have more features for hardware discovery and hardware information.

The integration with IQ operations management should be streamlined. ITSM and ITOM should be more integrated, and there should be better integration from Helix Discovery to Helix CMDB. There were some issues regarding this integration, and they were difficult to resolve in big environments. We have a lot of devices and users to manage. Therefore, the integration should be better.

I have been selling this solution since version 7, that is, for five years to seven years.

There is some difficulty in configuring high reliability and disaster recovery. Sometimes, the solution is not available for end users. The infrastructure must be configured in a certain way to keep it online most of the time. There are no bugs or issues.

It is scalable horizontally and vertically. The problem is that you have to use a lot of servers and server infrastructure to scale it. You need a really big infrastructure to manage and sustain ITSM. Most of our clients are big companies. 

They solved the problem most of the time. I would rate them a nine out of ten. It would be good to have Brazilian support. Currently, you have to talk to engineers in the US, India, and other countries. We don't have local support, and we have to work with a partner.

It was complex. The older versions were complex to customize and create some workflows. It took a lot of time to deploy. I don't know about the latest versions.

It is too expensive for a small business.

I would advise others to prepare and plan a lot before using the product. Define the exact workflows, themes, and end-user experience because the users sometimes don't use self-service. Customize it as little as possible.

I would rate BMC Helix ITSM an eight out of ten.

We are not using this product. Rather, we are proposing it as a part of our solution because we have experience with the on-premise and the ROE (remedy on demand). We upgrade and do the installation for our customers.

What I have found to be the most valuable is that it offers the radius deployment package not only to the BMC cloud but also to the public cloud such as Azure. You can also deploy it to a private cloud.

The Helix platform is not restricted to the ITSM. It has the capability to do the workflow management, the digital workplace, the discovery, and the monitoring. 

If you want to have to migrate from on-premises to Helix or from Helix to a ServiceNow, or from cloud to on-premises, it's easy but it requires additional tools. It should be included in the existing package, rather than clients having to go with a third-party tool. It could be offered to customers as a value on a separate line item.

There are some companies that provided a customized solution to identity what customization has been done, and to reduce the number of your upgrade cycle. If they had this type of solution included, it would be helpful.

In the next release, I would like to see AI used for classification or categorization.

I have been working with this solution since it's was launched, which has been a couple of years.

It's a stable solution.

It's easy to scale.

I belong to a larger enterprise. With this solution, you can go from smaller organizations to a large enterprise.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy. Within a few hours, you are up and running.

It's straightforward to install and configure it.

Pricing on the licensing depends on how you want to position it. If you are looking for some kind of professional services form the OEM then you would have to purchase that.

When you evaluate other products they all have their pros and cons.

The cost differs, as well as some of the functionalities.

I recommend this solution and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

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.

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.