BMC Helix 2- EMEA

For the past three years, I have been using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  in my current organization, Blue Yonder, where I utilize BMC Discovery management solution for discovering the multi-cloud workloads deployed for Blue Yonder, and in HSBC, I have used BMC Helix IT Service Management  along with BMC agents for monitoring servers spread across 60+ countries for HSBC Global IT infrastructure.

My main use case for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  in my current organization involves discovering the cloud workloads deployed in Microsoft Azure , VMware on-premise private cloud, GCP cloud, and OCI  cloud, for listing resources provisioned in the cloud as well as in the on-premise environment, where I use ServiceNow  as my IT CMDB , and BMC Discovery performs the discovery and scanning, sending the data to my ServiceNow CMDB .

The integration of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management with ServiceNow  is seamless; I am able to discover all the cloud-native products, and the experience is fantastic with a seamless integration.

The best features BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management offers include scalability, robust ITIL service management, and excellent discovery for the multi-cloud infrastructure, particularly excelling in change problem management.

In terms of features, particularly around change management, the product works very well, allowing me to create multiple kinds of changes such as normal change, expedited change, emergency change, and I can track the changes by logging into the respective portals.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has a positive impact on my organization by greatly improving workforce productivity; it creates dashboards for different personas within the organization, including the IT service management leadership team and the infrastructure operations engineering team, which is very useful for the day-to-day ITSM  process.

Specific metrics showing productivity improvement include our ability to reduce the number of incidents; since cloud workloads are always dynamic, BMC Discovery discovers the products every 24 hours, allowing me to get newly provisioned resources in any cloud platform used in Blue Yonder, which truly helps the infrastructure operations and engineering teams to easily track incidents and the recently provisioned resources.

Regarding my main use case or how BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management works with cloud environments, I believe it needs more interoperability and integration with data platforms such as Salesforce , Snowflake , and Databricks , which requires improvement.

To improve BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, the integration with data cloud platforms such as Salesforce , Snowflake , Databricks , and Redis  Cache needs to be enhanced as these modern data cloud platforms require more attention from BMC.

In terms of needed improvements, particularly regarding user experience, I believe more integration options are necessary within data cloud platforms, and the implementation timelines should be reduced.

I have been working for over 19 years in IT infrastructure management and cloud infrastructure management.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is very stable based on my experience.

The scalability of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is impressive; we run close to 22,000 workloads in Microsoft Azure  and 10,000+ virtual machines in the VMware on-premise environment, making the product very scalable for multi-cloud platforms, on-premise virtual infrastructure, and physical infrastructure, with support for legacy mainframe systems and IBM AIX systems as well.

The customer support for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is excellent.

I would rate the customer support a perfect 10.

We have not used any different solution before BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

The setup cost and licensing experience are straightforward, with minimal challenges encountered.

I have seen a return on investment with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management by reducing the MTTR by up to 30%, and while I cannot comment on money saved, the solution reduces the number of support staff required to manage a larger infrastructure for a SaaS organization such as Blue Yonder.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management indicates that the pricing is high compared to competitors available in the market, such as ServiceNow or Jira .

Before choosing BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, I evaluated other options such as ServiceNow and Jira  Service Management from Atlassian.

My advice for global enterprise organizations considering an IT service management product is to evaluate BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management product features and capabilities regarding AIOps , self-healing, AI and machine learning functionalities, and interoperability with existing tools and monitoring solutions; it is definitely worth the time spent in evaluating the product for enterprise needs.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is truly an enterprise-class product that assists global enterprises in day-to-day incident, change, and problem management, improving workforce productivity while being scalable and resilient, supporting all multi-cloud infrastructure platforms. I would rate this product 9 out of 10.

My main use case for BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  is related to the environment; once I provide feedback, it's helpful if your environment needs this service to serve it. BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  portal is divided into multiple services, including Discovery, workflow, ITSM , BHOM, dashboard, and service monitoring, all powered by AI. I have worked on all of these features, which has helped me. We use ITSM  in our company to solve the ticketing system for support tickets, and there are workflows opened from divisions like financial and sales that are very helpful. The Discovery tool helps discover all your assets in your company, making it necessary for collaboration between your servers and services.

Out of all those services, I mainly interact with the BHOM part day-to-day, where I work on the events that trigger the services and servers based on the threshold monitored by the monitor policy and the alarm policy. I also follow up with service monitoring. If there is any event opened or an incident occurred, it gets flagged based on these policies. The AI features help predict future issues with the server or service, such as potential thresholds being reached after a few hours. Therefore, I am mainly dedicated to BHOM.

One unique aspect of my workflow with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is that the dashboard reflects results from the BHOM, as well as from Discovery and service monitoring. Before using BHOM, it's important to have a good Discovery to know all your assets, as this assists in monitoring your services effectively.

The best features of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management depend on what your environment needs, as different companies might only require the dashboard or just Discovery without BHOM, ITSM, or workflow.

Personally, the most valuable features for my environment include BHOM, service monitoring, and the dashboard. The Discovery tool is necessary but works best in tandem with BHOM and service monitoring to establish reliable monitoring and insights into my environment.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management has positively impacted my organization by sending event alerts. For instance, if I monitor a server with disk thresholds, an email alert notifies the end user when storage is reaching its maximum capacity, which is extremely helpful.

By receiving alerts and emails ahead of time, I have noticed reductions in downtime. For example, monitoring a Hyper-V  environment allows me to keep an eye on the Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). When the CSV nears capacity, I can take action before an outage occurs, which has been crucial for system stability.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management could use improvements on the dashboard; having a ready-to-use dashboard that just needs asset information instead of building one from scratch would be helpful. The lack of templates for dashboards and limited email notification customization are also areas needing attention.

I have been using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management for one year.

In my experience, BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is stable.

The scalability of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management is good, as it grows with our organization's needs.

I have had positive experiences with customer support, having worked with both third-party teams and the BMC support team, including escalating cases to the R&D team which have been resolved successfully.

I did not use any solution before BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, but I worked with a company that used ManageEngine, which is also good. I am familiar with other tools such as SolarWinds and Zabbix , but my primary experience is with ManageEngine.

I have seen a return on investment, especially in terms of time saved. For instance, developing metrics to monitor disk capacity prevents potential disasters.

I do not have any advice for others looking into using BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, as I have provided all the information I have. I do not have any additional thoughts about BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management before we wrap up. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

My main use case for was for Incident/Request Management, Change Management and Knowledge Base .

In Incident Management , when an internal user reports a service disruption or system malfunction; either via phone or by sending an email to the IT service desk, a case is logged as an incident. The assigned IT support team then analyzes the incident, performs troubleshooting, and works toward service restoration.

A ticketing system is critical as it captures all incident related communications, actions, and status updates, creating an auditable history linked to the user and/or device. This historical data supports trend analysis, root cause investigation, and continuous service improvement.

In the context of change management, maintaining proper records was critical. Various IT teams regularly submitted change requests; however, these changes could sometimes have a significant impact on other teams or ongoing operations. For instance, the network team might plan an upgrade of Ruckus switches while the support team is simultaneously supporting a major event.

Change management ensures that when a change request is raised, all relevant teams are notified and given the opportunity to review the proposed change and provide input. If no concerns or queries are raised, the change can proceed through automatic approval. If concerns are identified, cross-functional discussions are conducted to assess risks, dependencies, and scheduling conflicts.

Documenting each step of the change process is essential for auditability, historical reference, and rollback purposes in the event that a change causes service disruption.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  positively impacted our organization by improving visibility, control, and coordination across teams. Its strong reporting and categorization enabled better analysis of incidents and requests, helping us identify trends and allocate resources more effectively.

The platform enhanced SLA tracking through clear dashboards, resulting in fewer breaches and improved service uptime. It also reduced incident resolution times by helping us quickly identify service-wide issues and prioritize responses. Overall, BMC Helix helped us manage services more efficiently and deliver more reliable outcomes.

One of the strongest features of BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management  was its reporting module, which stood out as the most valuable capability of the platform. The solution offered nine distinct categorization layers, including operational and product-based categories, which could be combined to generate highly meaningful reports. This structured categorization, together with the reporting module, significantly simplified our work.

During the launch of our ERP system, which included multiple modules such as HR, Finance and Supply Chain, we leveraged these product categories effectively. The hierarchy was structured with the Business Application as the primary category, followed by ERP, and then Oracle. The operational category further classified items into issues or requests. Under issues, we categorized items such as dashboards, reports, how-to requests, and queries, with an additional tier for specific dashboards. This multi-tier categorization proved extremely useful during reporting, as it gave us clear visibility into areas with the highest number of issues or requests, enabling us to allocate resources more effectively.

Additionally, the user interface allowed us to enable cost tracking, effort hours, and tier services into categories such as Gold and Silver, which added significant operational value.

At the individual team level; whether IT support, infrastructure, network, or security, the impact was minimal, as these teams were already collaborating effectively. However, the real value emerged in cross-team coordination. With BMC Helix in place, all teams had full visibility, and tasks and subtasks could be assigned across teams to support broader organizational objectives. This became even more effective when we onboarded HR modules into the system. We were able to add HR services and agents with restricted visibility, ensuring that IT managed the system while HR retained ownership of policies.

Incident resolution and SLA management became far more controlled due to the platform’s dashboards. Managers and CIOs had clear, real-time visibility into SLA performance, including the ability to track potential breaches within defined timeframes. As a result, we achieved fewer SLA breaches, maintained ninety-nine percent service uptime, and significantly improved service reliability.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management also excelled in accelerating service restoration, reducing incident resolution time, and maintaining service availability. When multiple incidents were raised across different locations, the system helped us quickly identify service-wide outages and focus our efforts where they were most needed. Rather than reducing resources, the platform enabled us to manage them more efficiently, which was one of its greatest strengths.

From my perspective, the main area for improvement in BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was the separation between incident and service request records. These were maintained as two distinct tables with different ticket numbers. If a common or linked ticket number had existed, it would have been much easier to relate incidents to service requests or convert one into the other. In practice, closing an incident and raising a service request resulted in a new ticket number, which often caused confusion as users would continue following up on the original ticket while updates were being made on the new one. Having interchangeability or a stronger linkage between incidents and requests would have been a valuable enhancement.

I rated the solution seven out of ten. Aside from the lack of interrelated incident and service request records, I had no major concerns from a user perspective.

The rating was also influenced by licensing considerations, as other tools in the market offered more flexible licensing models, such as concurrent usage. At the time, BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management did not allow reducing the concurrent session timing below ten minutes, which could have improved cost efficiency within the pricing model.

2 Years

In my personal experience, I have never experienced any downtime or reliability issues with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management.

BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was pretty scalable. As I mentioned earlier, we added the HR module under the same tenant, and it was pretty much scalable. They have scaled it up higher to finance and other modules already.

We had our local partner in the UAE, Magnoos Services. If we had any issues or new requests, we would reach out to them. I think they were very good partners, and we generally did not reach out to BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management directly.

I joined the organization when BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was already in place, and it remained the same throughout my tenure; there was no system transition during that time. However, I have personally been exposed to and worked with other ITSM  solutions.

I am really not sure how BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was deployed in my organization as this was before I joined. I joined as an admin, and these deployments were mostly handled with the infrastructure team.

Yes, BMC Helix improved efficiency, reduced SLA breaches, and maintained ~99% service uptime, enabling faster issue resolution and better resource allocation.

From what I heard from procurement and management, BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management overall is a costly setup. However, since I am in the support and administration team, I do not have much visibility over the cost.

I think the competitor BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management was evaluated against was ServiceNow .

The only advice I would give from my experience is to categorize the nine available categories properly, as they will be very helpful for reporting.