By Dick Stark
On August 24, 2016, Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for IT Service Support Management Tools. In this report, Remedy has remained in IT’s holiest of holy places, the upper right corner. However, the top spot still belongs to ServiceNow (SNOW), especially when their overall market share is factored in. Credit BMC for fighting back and gaining ground against a formidable competitor. (Remember, competition is a good thing. It was only a few years ago that Gartner was complaining about the “boring ITSM toolset space.”) The BMC-SNOW fight, however, is far from over as there are still plenty of bright spots ahead for BMC. For instance:
BMC still wins based up upon core technology. This is according to ITSM University, in Release 12 of its State of the IT Service Management Market, which was just published August 30. In fact, as a result of extensive product testing, Remedy 9.1 scored higher in the following modules: Incident, Problem, Change, Asset and Configuration, Release, Event, and Service Level Management. SNOW scored higher in Service Request and Service Catalog. Here are several comments from ITSMU about Remedy 9.1:
- The new interface can be described as nothing other than awesome.
- The SmartIT interface is absolutely groundbreaking and beautiful. The way you change locations, categories and services is simple and powerful. This will lower average handling times and improve data quality for management in a meaningful way.
- With Change Management’s new interface, it has quickly become the most user-friendly with a wizard based approach to creating changes.
Don’t forget about Remedyforce. ITSMU did not evaluate Remedyforce due to the lack of a significant number of Enterprise level customers, but does say, “Remedyforce is one of the most promising upcoming solutions in this market,” implying that Remedyforce, and not Remedy-on-Demand is best positioned to compete against SNOW. ITSMU even has something good to say about FootPrints 12, “ServiceCore version 12, is actually a pretty decent product for the price.”
BMC is working hard to make upgrades much simpler. As I reported last week, the upgrade to Remedy 9.5 should take minutes, not days. Unfortunately, the perception is that Remedy is expensive, and cumbersome to upgrade. And ITSMU reports that upgrade costs are reasonable if you get the right services partner. He must have been referring to RightStar.
The bottom line: RightStar is very well positioned to offer excellent ITSM solutions: Remedy, Remedyforce, and FootPrints, along with the other BMC ITOM products such as TrueSight (Performance and Application Management) and Blade Logic Service Automation (now referred to as Threat Director) for SecOps.
For the ITSMU report see:
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