By Dick Stark

BMC held a webinar this past Wednesday to provide an update on its new Innovation Suite, which is now available for partners and developers. Innovation Suite allows partners to create modern applications and publish them in the BMC Marketplace for customer consumption.

Just like ServiceNow or Atlassian, BMC is looking to its partners and developers to help populate its Marketplace with applications that sit on-top of its ARS platform and make Remedy more attractive to new buyers. BMC has had a Marketplace (formerly Marketzone) for 15+ years as Remedy got its beginnings as a platform (ARS) and developers built connectors, plug-ins and entire applications on top of ARS. Today BMC’s MarketPlace has nearly 300 offerings ranging from RightStar’s ScanStar to a connector from MyIT to JIRA for bug submission. A healthy Marketplace helps sell the base software platform.

BMC first announced its Innovation Suite at Engage last September. There was some confusion that the Innovation Studio was actually Remedy v9.5, but that’s not the case. Innovation Studio is a separate cloud based (AWS) application optimized to develop digital service management based apps in a very rapid way. At Engage, several BMC partners showcased two new apps: a crowd sourcing funding app for companies to track their employees’ donations of time and money, and an employee visit request app to check visitors in and out. Both developers said that they finished these apps in less than two weeks thanks to the drag and drop Innovation Suite developer toolkit.

To sign up, RightStar (or any developer) simply requests a developer sandbox (more than 400 have already been requested), and then develops using the developer’s toolkit. The developer decides what part of the app is configurable and builds the app using codeless app definitions with visual drag and drop designs. A library stores reusable code definitions. Everything gets translated to Java code. Eventually this means that Remedy consultants will need some knowledge of Java and JavaScript.

It’s important to note that Innovation Suite is currently only available in the cloud on AWS. My speculation is that BMC will announce an ITSM suite, maybe Remedy 10 that also be available on AWS and tightly integrated with Innovation Suite. In the meantime, any apps developed in the cloud, must also be consumed in the cloud. During the webinar, BMC reported that they are working on a connector to Remedy on-premise, but until then Innovation Suite is targeted for new Remedy systems (or new standalone apps) only.