BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

We have a different project in which we implement BMC Helix ITSM, including a built-in ERP solution that has different supply chain management, such as finance, and other projects. Each team assigns the tickets, and if any client is facing an issue in a particular model, they will create the ticket and it will go through this particular use case.

If it relates to supply the chain, it goes to a particular administrator or developers. In this use case, we use approximately 500 users in BMC Helix ITSM.

This solution provides complete incident management to our organization which has improved the organization. We have different projects and different models for handling incidents and resolving the client's issues. The solution has helped to manage all the tracking and has enabled us to manage. Additionally, it has helped us with cybersecurity incidents, it's very helpful to visualize and track the exact moment of a particular incident, which is crucial.

The most valuable features of BMC Helix ITSM are the collaboration, integrated with the help of another solution called Entity. We can do all the integration and receive an automatic ticket with the help of email. We are able to receive SMS alerts to clients and end users. Every step of the ticket is generated and we are able to resolve and close them. It's very helpful to have the ability to inform the user with detailed information.

I have been using BMC Helix ITSM for approximately seven years.

BMC Helix ITSM is a stable solution.

The scalability of BMC Helix ITSM is based on the license. If you need to scale you can purchase licenses.

We have approximately 500 users of this solution. We do not have plans to increase the usage of the solution in the future.

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

Positive

I did not use other similar solutions to BMC Helix ITSM.

The initial setup of BMC Helix ITSM is complex because it has different integrations with other tools. Additionally, it needs to be integrated with the active directory and have different databases. The environment will dictate how difficult the process is.

We did receive an ROI using the solution. It is a requirement for any organization for handling incidents, without it, it is not possible to do it in an automated or systematic way.

We evaluated Snow before choosing BMC Helix ITSM.

For the maintenance of the solution, we require one system administrator because sometimes it creates issues on the server level. One system administrator does not need to be dedicated, but then have other tasks such as the creation of groups and user for the applications, such as the ARM server.

This is a good tool and I would recommend it to others.

I rate BMC Helix ITSM a nine out of ten.

In general, for incident management, it's okay. It can fit tasks based on user management or change management. These kinds of modules are okay. 

We've had some small problems using the solution. It doesn't work perfectly.

There are some limitations or restrictions to using BMC Helix. For example, when we do some reporting, the reporting interface should be more user-friendly from my point of view. When compared to ServiceNow, it is lacking.

Also, there are so many restrictions when I am using the reporting. For example, there's a limitation on the number of records that can be returned. Maybe it is a performance issue? Therefore, the reporting aspect definitely is one of the things that need to improve for BMC Helix.

One of the things it can improve is the mobile app for support. When we submit a ticket on the incident and assign it to someone, we must use the computer instead of the mobile app. We'd like it to be mobile based as well.

My organization has used the solution for two or three years. I myself have only used the solution for one year.

When we do reports, I'm not sure if we have issues related to the performance or not.

It would be nice if they offered mobile support. Right now, we have to go to a desktop in order to get assistance and make a ticket.

The price is very high. It's an expensive product.

I pay for the solution yearly.

I have compared BMC against ServiceNow.

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten since I would like a mobile app for support, and the reporting needs to be better. 

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.

We mainly use it for service requests and incident management. It is being used for all problem tickets and change requests. We are using the latest version. 

We find the incident management module the best. The reporting part is also useful. We use a feature called smart reporting, and it is very beneficial for us.

Its performance can be improved. Sometimes, there is a performance issue, and it is a little slow and difficult on the usage side. It would be beneficial for us if there is a lighter version of this solution. 

There is also a limitation on the number of columns and memory for extracting a report, and this functionality can be improved.

We would like to have better integration and UI in this solution. The user interface should be easy to navigate. Its integration with other tools, such as SharePoint or Jira, can also be improved, which would be beneficial for us.

In terms of new features, there should also be a mobile version. The desktop version is available, but the mobile version is not available, which is one of the challenges that our team has. For users who work on Remedy and who raise the ticket, it would also be very beneficial to have some chatbot features.

I have been using this solution for the past four years.

Its stability is good.

We have around 7,000 users.

Their support is sufficient and fine as of now. Our interaction is currently minimal. We generally use the community portal to contact the BMC team. We are also looking for other tools, and we are mostly connecting with the technical team.

We used a tool called HEAT. We were also using the VPN version of Remedy that had to be installed on a system. We were not using the web-based version of Remedy.

We migrated to this solution because it is available on the web, and it is easy to access. The previous one had to be installed on a system. If you wanted to raise a ticket and work on the ticket, the user had to raise a request for installation. There were a lot of other things that had to be taken care of before using the solution. That is the reason we moved to BMC Helix ITSM.

The initial setup was simple. It took around six months to one year.

We took the help of a vendor. For maintenance, we have a separate Remedy team. The maintenance of the cloud part is taken care by the vendor team.

It is not very expensive and not very cheap. It is somewhere in-between. Some of the features are more expensive. 

There are also additional costs. If you want to use most of the features, you need to pay more.

I would recommend this solution because it includes all the best practices of ITIL and ITSM used across the industry. It is a good product.

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

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.

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.

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 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.