BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

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. 

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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

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.

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.