By Dick Stark

Last week, RightStar attended and helped sponsor, the Service Management and Automation Conference (SMAC) 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, CyberTrain, to organize and host their own annual conference.) This year’s show was slightly smaller than last year’s because the show’s focus was Remedy only.

Key show takeaways:

Chatbots, aka, Helix Bots, are getting hot. With about eight different Chatbot presentations, (including RightStar’s), that message was heard loud and clear. BMC mentioned the RightStar GWU success in their Keynote, and we had several BMC customers express interest.

Zero Downtime Upgrades. Administrators can now roll out 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.

Simplification/Auto Deployment of Packages. The install process is moving from installers to deployable packages for automated deployment and synchronization of server groups. BMC reported that a cloud-based Helix software installation now takes about five minutes vs four weeks, prior to containers. Doug Mueller, Remedy inventor, described a situation where a customer moved from 76 servers to 18, stating, “you no longer need to put all the apps on different servers.”

UVA Health. Our UVA Health customer, gave a presentation entitled, “Managing an EMR Go Live using Digital Workplace.” UVA developed a form that is embedded into the Epic application that allows users to submit an Epic ticket. In approximately one year, this form was submitted 16,673 times. UVA estimated, time saved as a result of DWP, rather than a phone call was 1346 hours or more than half of an FTE, a huge success.

Remedyforce, Beyond IT. RightStar presented a customer case study on the use of Remedyforce, in non-IT applications like HR, Facilities, Benefits, Payroll, and Security. This was taken from a large county government project which is nearing completion.

Astound is a new AI Silicon Valley start-up with an AI enterprise platform for service management with integrations to Remedy, ServiceNow and Jira. Interestingly, because Astound is purpose built for ITSM, it is an alternative to IBM Watson in BMC’s Chatbot offering.