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ServiceNow vs BMC Remedy 

Overview of ServiceNow and Remedy

ServiceNow and BMC Remedy are two of the most popular IT Service Management (ITSM) tools used by enterprises. ITSM solutions have a significant impact over a company’s processes, issue resolutions, workflows, and customer satisfaction. This is why when choosing the best solution for their needs, businesses need to weigh in many factors, and in most cases the decision is not easy.

In this article, we not only aim to help you choose the best solution for your specific needs, but also would like to show you how you can benefit from both – ServiceNow and BMC Remedy without compromising the quality of your help desk operations.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform for IT Service Management which helps enterprises automate service and helpdesk tasks. It delivers targeted personalized experiences with all the resources teams need to get their work done. The platform helps visualize business process workflows in a simple, task-oriented way and automatically assigns work items to representatives based on availability, capacity, and skills.

Thanks to ServiceNow, employees can respond to issues more efficiently and work from anywhere they want. The platform helps teams become more agile, and businesses become more flexible when handling various request types. ServiceNow enables organizations to intuitively define, structure, manage, and automate processes for service desk operations. Customers get fast and precise responses and resolutions.

ServiceNow main features:

  • Process Automation Designer – build and manage multiple complex workflows
    with no-code playbooks.
  • Workspaces – deliver targeted personalized experiences with all the resources
    teams need to get their work done.
  • Service level management – gather service requirements and monitor and manage
    SLAs.
  • Flow Designer – build, connect, and automate cross enterprise workflows in a
    single, no code design environment.
  • Advanced Work Assignment – automatically assign work items to agents based on
    availability, capacity, and skills.
  • Reports & dashboards – easily create and configure customized reports and
    eye-catching dashboards.
  • Process Optimization – user visual process maps and cluster analyses to
    identify bottlenecks and streamline work.
  • Data encryption, privacy & access controls – choose from multiple flexible
    encryption options to meet individual organizational needs and maintain full control over your
    data.

ServiceNow combines machine learning with workflows, which streamline change management and digital transformation, creating a modern, connected organization.

About BMC Remedy/Helix

BMC delivers modern, intelligent ITSM solutions. BMC Remedy is the on-prem version and BMC Helix is the cloud version of the Remedy platform. BMC Helix ITSM is the combination of the two, delivered in the cloud or on premises and allowing for multi-cloud environments. BMC Helix provides industry-leading, next-generation service management that magnifies the best ITSM practices.

The platform is good at handling large sets of data at high speed. No matter if these are your incidents and tickets, management of your infrastructure or handling of other IT operations.

BMC Helix enables you to create and resolve incidents faster, focus on high-value problem areas and reduce management load. It leverages AI to detect clusters of recurring incidents for intuitive analysis and streamlining of problem management. The tool allows you to easily visualize cross-functional service and operations management information.

BMC Helix ITSM main features:

  • Incident & Problem Management – create and resolve incidents faster with
    intelligent incident matching and a modern, persona-based UI optimized across devices.
  • Proactive Problem Management – accurately identify and automate clusters of
    recurring incidents and tedious, manual problem management processes.
  • Digital Workplace – omni-channel availability of value-added experiences and
    knowledge management helps employees find the information they need, when they need it.
  • Multi-cloud broker – secure, seamless service experience across multi-cloud
    environments.
  • Powerful reports and visualizations – data about incidents, changes, service
    requests, chatbot conversations, metrics, events, capacity, and more
  • Insights – data driven insights based on the relevance of data
  • Change Release Management – enhanced risk analytics automate routine changes
    that don’t require interaction as well as deliver critical information needed for agent
    decisions
  • Optimized for ITIL® 4

BMC’s solutions are fast and accurate no matter if you want to operate in the cloud, in a hybrid model, or in your own data center. BMC Helix enables agile organizations to maximize the delivery and overall quality of service while ensuring governance and compliance as they pursue their journey to becoming an autonomous digital enterprise.

Similarities and Differences: ServiceNow vs Remedy

ServiceNow and BMC Helix are two of the biggest names in the IT service management industry. According to Gartner, these two platforms make up almost 50% of the market. Both companies have earned goodwill and reputation after providing innovative solutions to complex problems, winning lots of satisfied customers, and achieving a long list of industry awards.

Both BMC Helix and ServiceNow are cloud-based, highly flexible and configurable. They meet most of the needs of enterprises in terms of ITSM, like asset management, service desk support, and process automation.

The two tools have extensive capabilities like automating workflows and repetitive issues handling, creating custom reports and visualizations, tracking tickets and complex cases, managing service level agreements, omni-channel availability, and a lot more.

However, each of them also has some unique advantages.

BMC Helix ITSM is designed with ease of use in mind. Tickets are easy to view and edit at any stage of their processing. The search function is fast and accurate. The platform provides multiple options for workflow triggers and automation, such as automatically recording a ticket’s solution into a knowledge base visible to users and IT employees. BMC Helix has report templates that significantly simplify reporting, especially if a user needs to generate similar reports frequently.

ServiceNow ITSM is a highly comprehensive platform, with great flexibility and options for customization. It stands out with its CMDB functionality, providing users with detailed searching, filtering, and interdependency options. Users who need to work with a lot of similar tasks appreciate its catalogue feature that allows them to configure multiple tasks with repeated information and make necessary tweaks before submitting them all with a single click. There is an individual overview, which makes it easy for each user to see which tickets are assigned to them and track their workload.

Some other differences worth mentioning:

BMC Helix ITSM is generally simpler to use and set up, while ServiceNow ITSM has more customization options and configuration management database (CMDB) features. Overall, BMC Helix doesn’t offer the same level of detail as ServiceNow. Users of ServiceNow, on the other hand, can sometimes get confused by its complex and vast configuration options.

When asked to assess the essential features of ITSM software, users most often point customizable workflow automation, escalation mechanisms, and a system for ticket creation – internally for employees and externally for end users. Templates, scripts, and decision trees are also needed, as well as notifications, advanced reporting, and scheduling. A knowledge base and an SLA mechanism are among important capabilities, too.

Overall, both ServiceNow and BMC Helix have all the essential features that businesses are looking for. ServiceNow is considered a bit more feature-rich than BMC Helix. However, BMC is simpler to setup and use, and the reporting with it is easier. ServiceNow offers more sophisticated capabilities, like ticket routing and surveys within the reporting options, while these are missing in BMC Helix. Still the features that are considered important by most users are present in both.

Comparison chart: ServiceNow vs Remedy

Here are some side-by-side comparisons to help you judge ServiceNow and BMC Remedy better. 

  BMC Helix  ServiceNow 
Incident and Problem Management  Very good  Very good 
Self-Service/Request Fulfillment  Good  Good 
IT Knowledge Management  Good  Good 
Reporting and Analytics  Easy, but advanced enough  Quite advanced, includes surveys,
but slightly harder to work with 
SLA Management  Good  Good 
Workflow Design and Flexibility  Good  Very good 
AITSM  Good  Good 
Change and Release Management  Good  Very good 
Configuration Management  Very good  Good 
Collaboration  Very good  Very good 
Quality of Technical Support  Good  Good 
Quality of Peer User Community  Well developed, 
rich community 
Well-developed community 
with great peer support 
Asset Management  Very good  Excellent 
Ticket/Incident Management  Very good  Excellent 
Process workflow  Excellent  Good 
Ticketing system  Excellent  Very good 
Automation  Excellent  Very good 
Pricing  Customized quotes,
depends on usage. Free trial 
Customized quotes,
depends on usage. Free trial, and free version. 

If you are using both ServiceNow and Remedy

In large enterprises, different teams are often using different platforms, and it is quite common for both ServiceNow and Remedy to be used. Also, if you are using one of these tools, but your customer the other, you may need to consider connecting them. Each team is accustomed to their software and often times it would be too costly and time-consuming to switch from ServiceNow to BMC and vice versa.

In such cases a great solution is integrating Remedy with ServiceNow. An integration platform allows the seamless transfer of information between these platforms. All the data will be in sync automatically and no one will need to transfer incidents or change requests manually from one system to the other.

With a no-code integration platform like ZigiOps, you can set up a ServiceNow Remedy integration in minutes and have them connected right away. This will improve cross-team collaboration, speed up issue resolutions and boost customer satisfaction. Having all necessary data immediately available will eliminate silos and delays caused by manual work, and help you resolve critical issues much faster.

All these things improve the overall business results.

Book a demo and see how easy it is to achieve this with ZigiOps.

Summary

Both ServiceNow ITSM and BMC Helix ITSM have wonderful capabilities to help enterprises manage complex tasks, automate workflows, and streamline helpdesk processes. Choosing one of them is not an easy task and you need to take into consideration the specific needs of your organization.

However, if you have a team that is familiar with one of the tools, and another team that is used to the other tool, it is not necessary to choose just one and undertake complex and costly switching between systems. You can simply integrate ServiceNow with BMC Helix and have the best of both worlds. With ZigiOps you can quickly integrate the two platforms and have even the most complex scenarios work perfectly in no time.