By Dick Stark

In case you haven’t seen the August 25, 2014, Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools, report, Remedy has remained in IT’s holiest of holy places, the upper right corner.  However, the top spot now belongs to ServiceNow (SNOW), a position held by Remedy since November 2010 to August 2014.  It was a good run, and it is far from over as there are still plenty of bright spots ahead for BMC.  For instance:

BMC is still the market share leader with 38% market share with all ITSM platforms (Remedy, Remedy on-Demand, FootPrints, Remedyforce, and Track-It!) as compared to 19% for SNOW.  This is according to ITSM University, in Release 11 of its State of the IT Service Management Market, which was just released last month.

Remedyforce is coming on strong. I mentioned previously when I talked to so many of our Remedyforce customers how satisfied they were with Remedyforce.  At Salesforce.com’s, on-line AppExchange, Remedyforce holds a 4.2 out of 5 overall rating. Even more astonishing is the rating Remedyforce received in the State of the ITSM Market.

That report rates Remedyforce in third place overall, behind SNOW and Remedy, and ahead of HP Service Manager, Frontrange HEAT, and CA Nimsoft.  From the State of the ITSM Market, “Remedyforce is built on Force.com, therefore it is built on arguably the best SaaS application architecture available. Remedyforce is one of the most promising upcoming solutions in this market.”

Remedy is making a strong comeback. BMC is not going to allow SNOW to eat its lunch forever and is working hard to get its mojo back.  For example, BMC wasted no time in releasing Smart IT, a new FaceBook like front-end for Remedy.  (Smart IT’s conception to release spawned only about six months which is an amazing accomplishment.)  Even better, BMC learned from its award winning MyIT, that users feel they have paid enough for Remedy.  So, Smart IT is free.

RightgStar has already validated that Smart IT should be a big hit.  We are working with an existing customer, a Smart IT early adopter to figure out how to roll this out. (The customer’s main complaint, that Smart IT is not customizable, will be fixed in the next release.)  Early feedback is very favorable: more functionality with fewer clicks and forms, better leveraging of collective knowledge, and improved mobile user functionality, especially when paired with MyIT.

What’s significant is that no one disagrees about Remedy’s position as the most fully functional ITSM solution available, period. The ITSM Market Report rates Remedy a sold 5.0.  SNOW by comparison, rates a 3.0, which is the same rating assigned to Remedyforce.  SNOW excels because of its entire ecosystem. From Gartner, “SNOW has a strong, highly effective sales and marketing capability that has attracted many customers and driven its product into most of the ITSSM RFP shortlists.”

This means that there is plenty of life left in BMC and its family of ITSM solutions, and continued opportunity ahead for BMC (and RightStar) with Remedy, Remedyforce, and FootPrints.