Remedy Service Management 9.0, the new IT service management (ITSM) platform from BMC, is designed to provide both IT managers and end users with a more intuitive, consumer-type experience. BMC announced the release of the new platform, which it claims can boost IT productivity by up to 75 percent, earlier this month.
BMC said the Remedy 9 platform provides a Smart Reporting feature for IT professionals that delivers custom reports, dashboards and user-friendly interfaces for “better, faster decisions.” For end users in the enterprise, Remedy 9 offers MyIT for cloud-based service management and self service. Available now, Remedy 9 is priced at $ 80 per user per month.
‘Consumer-Like’ Experience
The key to effective IT service management today is delivering an experience that replicates what end users have come to expect from their home and personal experiences, IDC Research Manager Robert Young told us. It’s important to provide IT services that are as quick and easy to deploy as are, say, an Android phone app or an Amazon service, said Young, who focuses on end-point devices, IT service management and client virtualization software.
“The cloud and BYOD, those types of trends, are making tech more accessible to employees without IT staff,” Young said. While that’s convenient for end users, it’s not always good for enterprises who find such ad-hoc solutions can increase IT security risks and make information harder to access because it’s stored in various silos across user devices and the cloud.
“It’s very hard to bring the information behind those solutions into a place where enterprises can leverage it,” Young said. BMC’s Remedy 9 helps solve that problem by providing a fast, easy-to-use and consumer-like IT experience to end users, he said. It also makes it easier for IT departments to provide the kind of 24/7 service people expect on the consumer side through its knowledge base and self-service options, Young added.
‘Most Important Release of Remedy’
To ensure a user-friendly look and feel for Remedy 9, BMC worked with input from more than 700 end users as well as 170 enterprise customers.
“Purpose-built for a new era of IT workers, Remedy 9 offers an intuitive and engaging experience to redefine how IT work gets done and to move companies towards a digital service management model,” said Robin Purohit, President of BMC’s Service Support business. Purohit called the new platform “the most important release of Remedy in BMC’s history.”
Dennis Drogseth, Vice President of Enterprise Management Associates Inc. and author of a recent EMA research report on the future of IT service management, told us that Remedy 9 “is making ITSM more accessible, scalable and functional and more persona-aware. It is building on the need to marry technology with the human community, both across IT and between IT and its service consumers.”
While ITSM has been evolving to become the”center of the universe, it’s “a fact that’s still sadly lost on much of the industry,” Drogseth said. BMC is showing its leadership in that area by “evolving — as it must and should — without sacrificing ease of deployment and administration to function,” he said.
Because Remedy has been on the market for as long as it has, the next challenge for BMC will be for the company to “educate the market” about the latest platform’s new capabilities, Young said.
