By Dick Stark

Several weeks ago, BMC’s Joel Jacks presented a Helix cloud migration partner webinar. Joel discussed how current Remedy customers can efficiently migrate from their current Helix on-prem version into the cloud. This is a major focus for BMC and its partners– to preserve the BMC Remedy customer install base and migrate into a total SaaS based cloud solution. Here are some highlights.

Why migrate? It’s not just BMC. All software vendors now offer cloud solutions, and some like ServiceNow offer cloud-based software only. Once migrated to Helix, future software upgrades are mostly automatic. The good news: no more hassles about server provisioning, database implementations, middleware and operating systems. The BMC Helix platform eliminates the need for expensive upgrades, which has irked many a BMC customer over the years. Helix is not exactly brand new, as several years ago RightStar upgraded a local University’s on-premise system to Helix, and now they are a BMC and RightStar success story. Below are several other potential upgrade candidates.

A DOD customer is making good progress with on-premise Remedy but understands the value a Helix cloud migration will bring to the organization in terms of process and productivity improvements. Thus, their decision to move to the Helix cloud was an easy one. BMC made the decision even easier by moving forward with FedRAMP IL4 certification which offers DOD accounts like this one the level of security they require.

RightStar is involved with another DOD customer where we will provide a long overdue on-prem migration to the current Remedy version. This is an important upgrade as it will provide an opportunity to upgrade the aging network and server infrastructure. Once upgraded, the next phase is Digital Workplace Advanced followed by an eventual move into the cloud.

A mid-Atlantic Hospital System has been a RightStar customer for more than five years. Due to the pandemic, budgets have been cut and it is a challenging time to spend money. The real challenge is the cost of not doing anything. And what about process maturation and the best use of their more limited Remedy resources?  When the Remedy team spends too much valuable time managing the ITSM infrastructure, the process improvement initiatives get put on hold or have their timelines slip. The good news is that the Helix cloud will offer real hard dollar savings. The organization currently has 17 servers and Oracle, so the server and Oracle cost savings will be significant.

A similar RightStar customer, by contrast just upgraded to Remedy on-prem version 19.08. The migration was a success. For similar budgetary reasons, they are interested in waiting until next year to upgrade. Server and software expenses are the obvious reasons to migrate, but like the above customer, a move to the cloud means that the Remedy team gets to spend more time on improvements like Digital Workplace Advanced and even chatbots.  

Joel Jacks concluded the partner webinar by highlighting several customer success stories.  BMC has worked hard to create a phased migration approach with successful end results. Like BMC, RightStar has excellent upgrade experience and more cloud migrations on the way.