RightStar’s fifth annual customer appreciation cruise, held May 5th on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., drew a large crowd of 105. Sean Tierney, BMC Director of Consulting was the keynote speaker.  It was a beautiful day to be on the Potomac and a good time was had by all.

Sean Tierney discussed the future of Remedy and in particular version 8. He mentioned that the next release of Remedy (perhaps version 7.7) will have a new next generation user interface for the Service Request Manager (SRM). He also described an overlay based installer that reduces upgrade times. Other new features include application based bread crumbs and “wire frames” to assist with form generation and an auto-field fill in to allow analysts to complete tickets in fewer keystrokes.  A good guess for this release will be towards the end of 2011.

Linda Kiechlin, Liz Yost, and Nikki Haase of RightStar

Remedy version 8 will be available by mid-next year and will be a modernized Java based AR system with support for open systems. It will include a new service catalog lifecycle and USM uptake to automate service creation and maintenance. Remedy 8 will also support a Java CMDB.

Heidi Sanzari, BMC On-Demand Channel Director, described BMC’s SaaS offerings which include Remedy-on-Demand (RoD) and Remedyforce.  RoD offers the exact same functionality and software release cycle as Remedy except it is available as a SaaS offering. Remedyforce is BMC’s mid-level service management built on the force platform.  Heidi mentioned that Remedy force has evolved quickly from a simple incident and asset tracking system to a full-fledged ITSM system to include or soon include service level management, social media integration, service catalog, and release management.

RightStar’s Alan Shaeffer concluded by briefly discussing BMC ITBM, and BMC MarketZone offerings: enlyte and Matrix 42. He said that these products provide solutions to service costing/project portfolio management, data center management, and configuration management respectively. Alan wrapped up by saying that RightStar can provide the entire solution, from design to implementation to management.