More information on On Demand from the expert, Tony Myers! Apologies, he meant to post on Nov. 12th, but ... well... things happen...
From: Tony Myers [mailto:for...@developer.bmc.com] Sent: Friday, November 12, 2010 2:29 PM To: Brock, Anne BMC Communities<http://communities.bmc.com/communities/index.jspa> Customizing BMC Remedy OnDemand Frequently Asked Questions: Q: Why do you limit customizations in Remedy OnDemand and what are the limitations? A: (posted to ARList on Nov 12) We do support customizations as a part of the Remedy OnDemand offering and those customizations are maintained during upgrade as long as they are in line with best practices guidelines. What we have seen so far is that customers are using the move to SaaS as an opportunity to drive standardization and consolidation. This means 0-10% customization vs. highly customized environments. The cadence of delivery (updates 2-3 times a year) is probably the primary consideration for considering on-premise or MSP delivery mechanisms for highly customized environments. Customizations are maintained but customers still need to make sure their logic around the customizations are valid from release to release. Any SaaS provider that allows customizations has this constraint (the more customizations, the more evaluation the customers need to do, the longer it takes in a short period). Since there is no option to skip releases in SaaS, it presents a unique challenge for customers that like the concept of SaaS but don't like the cadence of the release it brings. For this reason, we have defined best practices around customizations that outline things customers SHOULD stay away from. This guide is going through some revisions and will we plan to post in on-line soon. Customizations that are adding features and functionality are typically okay. Some light modifications to existing workflow are also okay (as long as its done correctly). We warn customers to stay away from heavy customizations that effect core workflow or foundational structures. An example of this is adding a forth tier to operational categorization, or changing the way multi-tenancy works, or modifying the organizational structures. These are changes with wide impact across the suite. With the existing offering, we put a certification process in place that guards against 1) customizations that dont conform to best practice, and 2) moving significant customizations into production as we know that customers could struggle with validating and potentially adjusting the logic in the short upgrade timeframe. The overlay concept will significantly help customers automatically preserve customizations as well. Finally, there were some comments on BSM and SaaS. Our direction is absolutely BSM OnDemand. This does NOT mean all components run in the cloud but it does mean use cases that cross OnDemand and on-premise are achievable. For example, ADDM or another discovery technology can be deployed on-premise and pushes updates to the CMDB that sits in the OnDemand offering. The discovery technology sits close to the infrastructure as would other infrastructure specific technology like alerting and, to some extent, automation. The key is the integrations and performance. The typical integrations we have seen so far is through web services and direct API calls (requires an internet VPN). This hybrid approach to BSM is very achievable and we have some live customers consuming bits of it now. Thank you for your participation on BMC Communities.
