BMC Helix ITSM Reviews

• 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.

• 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.

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.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, which allows us to customize it per our customers' requirements.

• Email Notification that are triggered as and when there is an update on assigned ticket, unassigned ticket, pending, and resolved.
• Multiple mailbox configurations helped people from different organizations to communicate/create incidents.

As of now, the new release of version 9 is in place which is resolving the issues reported related to Reporting, Change Management, Approval Console, Dashboards.

I've used it for almost 9 years now.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Customer service is a 9 out of 10.

Technical support is a 9 our of 10.

The system on our end is home-grown, which is used for consulting mostly to online and remote clients.

I think that the ROI is perfect with the pricing/licensing concept.

You can implement it with customizations per your requirements as it's a flexible product.

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.

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.  

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.

Aligning IT processes within your organization with best practices, like ITIL.

Having all the processes, fields, and settings already setup out-of-the-box, thus minimizing implementation time.

Our organization already had another solution, therefore there were no issues accepting such a solution. However, the ease of use and integration made it a worthwhile investment, since we did some integrations with other tools making our lives easier.

• Service request management: Ease and speed of creating new requests. 
• Ease of integration: There are plenty of integration options, e.g., web services, email, RESTful API, and even an ETL tool, Pentaho, which helps a lot.

The amount of software issues are still too big, even considering the complexity of the tool. Whenever you start exploring some new product features, you run into defects. It has been like this for the last six years.

Support could be more skilled. We are wasting too much of our time debugging.