By Dick Stark

Last week, RightStar attended and helped sponsor, the Service Management and Automation conference in Las Vegas. (When BMC moved from its Engage annual user group conference, to regional Exchange one-day conferences, this created an opportunity for a BMC training partner, Tools, Technology, and Training (T3) to organize and host their own annual conference.) Many of the attendees were RightStar customers, and RightStar also had three presenters at the show.

Key takeaways:

• Remedy is continuing to improve. V9 SP4 should be out before the end of the year. It will include:
  • Smart IT configurable fields to better help drive smart IT user adoption. (most requested new feature)
  • Zero Downtime Upgrades. Administrators can now rollout everything—Windows and Unix executables, etc. And everything can be rolled back later, with no loss of data, if any snag is hit along the way.
  • Auto Deployment of Packages. The install process is moving from installers to deployable packages for automated deployment and synchronization of server groups.
• BMC’s new Innovation Suite, offers an easy to use digital workflow platform for developers, partners and customers. Innovation Suite is designed for rapid application development, which is what everyone wants in today’s agile software environment.

At the conference Terence Chesire, VP Product Management, DSM demoed a BMC “Smart Facilities” app that has been tested to support 700 million CI’s. In today’s rapidly changing and competitive environment, companies must organize their business to meet specific and unique requirements. Software must be agile and easy to develop and modify. Out-of-the box products that often require extreme configuration to meet specific needs, don’t work well in this environment.

That’s why BMC’s Innovation Suite is such a good fit and complimentary platform for Remedy. And this is where the difference between Remedy and ServiceNow is most obvious. A lot of ServiceNow customers, using Java scripting, spend a significant amount of time customizing ServiceNow’s many “out-of -the box” modules to meet specific needs.

When it comes time to upgrade, most of the “customizations,” will not upgrade without a “fight,” leading to long upgrade times and high cost, exactly what ServiceNow used previously as a weapon to convince customers to move away from the old Remedy.

Now, Remedy, with its Zero Downtime Upgrades, offers a much lower operational cost, and its Innovation Suite, offers rapid application development of specific apps, like HR or Facilities to meet customer needs. For example, just what does ServiceNow offer for HR or Facilities? There are so many ways of developing an HR or Facility system, that ServiceNow’s HR or Facility modules must be impossibly general, or come with way too many confusing templates. HR or Facility software must do whatever the company needs it to do. That is different for every company, and why Innovation Suite is a much better solution.

But, it’s not just HR or Facility software. Nowadays, IT runs the business. And should the business run on off-the shelf software? The power of tools like Remedy Innovation Suite is that it allows businesses to be run the way they need to be run.