BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

• 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.