We are a partner for OpenText and BMC, and this is our main professional service delivery. We are the professional service delivery arm for both of them.

I am responsible for the ITSM products, such as OpenText SMAX, Helix ITSM, and others.

It is not only ITSM, it is an ESM as well.

It is mainly the DWP. And the ITSM modules, IAM, incident, request, change, and others. Mainly for the ESM, the most beneficial layer is the interfacing layer of the DWP, the Digital Workplace. And actually the advanced service catalog.

The underlying work orders and workflows of the service catalog are a mainly critical point for the ESM and even the interface for the ITSM tool as well.

Recently, it is good. It is promising. It is still not totally amazing. Even for BMC, for OpenText, for ServiceNow, for all the vendors, it is a booming technology. And all vendors are trying to integrate it inside their ITSM tools. Still, there are some limitations, especially related to the Arabic language, especially for the Middle East. The LLM language model and LLM models are not supporting Arabic for most of the tools. So this is a weakness. However, I can see some vendors are still working on this point right now because there are LLM models in the market supporting Arabic.

For automation, you have multiple tools depending on the vendor. For example, for OpenText, we have an OO integration, Operation Orchestration with SMAX. For BMC, we have Control-M as well, and can automate some items. All vendors as well inside their portfolio are considering the automation. It is not a native function inside the tool, but actually within the portfolio with seamless integration. It fits for purpose.

It is perfect, unless there is the support of the Arabic language. Supporting the Arabic language is the critical point, especially for ESM more than ITSM. Because for the ITSM, most of the IT staff can handle the English or any language besides Arabic. But when you are targeting the ESM, you are targeting the HR team, the finance team, the maintenance team. Not all these teams treat with English terminologies or report their cases with English. At this moment, the Arabic language or their native Arabic language should be considered and it will be more important inside the chatbots. I would prefer to chat with my own language.

Enhancing AI support for the Arabic languages, enhancing the automation of the ticket, and automation of the ticket workflows would make it simpler for implementation and simpler for enhancements. Adding more capabilities for adding more flexibility of the customization is important. This is not only for BMC, even for OpenText, even for ServiceNow. As long as you are moving to a low-code platform, you are limiting my capability to customize. The solution will be fit for purpose perfectly for a low-customization environment. However, it is a limitation for the low-code environments. All low-code environments have limitations when customizing. When you compare, for example, in OpenText, when you compare SMAX to the legacy Service Manager, Service Manager has more capabilities for customization, more than SMAX. This is the same between Helix and Remedy. Overall, BMC still has a very powerful way to customize. It still has a very good customization capability.

For the last 10 years.

All vendors have several plans for support, for supporting models. From premium to standard, advanced. It depends on the supporting package you purchased. For example, if you are talking about premier support in OpenText or BMC or whatever, and you have a dedicated resource, the response time will be much better. The initial phases of investigation will be very short because you have a dedicated, assigned resource who is understanding your environment, already knows your environment, already knows your understanding and your needs, so it will be much better.

Also, for the support of BMC, especially for BMC Helix on cloud as a software-as-a-service, the support will be faster than the response in investigating an on-prem solution. This is crucial for the troubleshooting of the infrastructure or a bug. For example, if a system is down totally, I am not talking about software enhancements or an issue inside the tool itself, but talking about if a system is down or if you have a critical ticket, BMC Helix SaaS is very good for support, more than support for on-prem. This is the same for ServiceNow, same for OpenText, same for everything. It is about the SaaS supporting model because the resource is already understanding or well-understanding the infrastructure deployment that happened on the cloud, on their cloud.

All vendors can compete with their pricing. All vendors for the same class, for example, if you are talking about the world-class such as BMC, ServiceNow, OpenText, all of them can compete in front of each other. I am not talking about the same price for medium-scale such as ManageEngine or smaller tools. But for the same scale of the vendors, almost all of them are near to each other.

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.