Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
We are a new install for ITSM 8.1 and that has taken over a year to install as well. Lots and lots of data mapping and migration. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Thats a good question Jim. Vivek can you asnwer?? Is this a part of support contract or do you charge anything extra ? One thing I came to know today for grooming SNow in the market ia that they have sales representatives everywhere and they are skilled enough to grab the customers interest. Even in training classes they recommend their students to switch to SNow to build their carrer. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
John, The pieces written in flash are constant pain in my side. I would rather they go the other way and get rid of flash in the product entirely. Anyone with any degree of intelligence will look past the glitz of sales and marketing and look to what the product really provides. Flash IMHO just slows down the performance of the product as a whole. Jim Coryat Senior Software Engineer Micron Technology, Inc. -Original Message- From: John Baker [mailto:jba...@javasystemsolutions.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 1:54 PM Subject: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hello I can state that JSS loses customers because they move from BMC to elsewhere. When a customer doesn't renew support, I make a point of asking them why and it's almost always because the BMC platform has been canned. But SNOW isn't always the destination of choice. There have been a few cases of a customer taking their SSO Plugin for BMC license to their shiny new HP ITSM system, ie one problem solved and the migration effort reduced. BMC have no interest in AR System beyond ITSM, that much has been obvious for years and to be fair, it makes good business sense. The world is full of easy to use programming languages and workflow style products, so why try to compete with low cost/free solutions? What puzzles me is why AR System still exists given the numerous issues reported to this list - why hasn't BMC bitten the bullet and gotten rid of the parts not already written in Flash? I'm not suggesting it's a smart option, because customising ITSM is a useful sales point, but it's easy to script Python and modern, transactional database technology is available for free. I used SNOW the other day. I selected a category and waited for workflow to fire - it reminded me of Mid Tier 5.1, ie abysmal performance. It's not all that great, but sadly, neither is the ITSM installation process. John ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Hi All, I'm one of the support managers at BMC, in response to the Amigo question, YES, this is part of your regular support contract. The idea is to achieve upgrade success through planning. For customers that are not engaging BMC consulting services this helps us to share our experience in helping to avoid upgrade issues proactively. This offering is all about the planning. Its something that our Control-M team have been doing for a while with huge success and we are looking to roll the program out across all product lines. Right now we are live in the Americas with this for ITSM suite and in the process of rolling out in EMEA going live March 31st. Check out BMC communities for details https://communities.bmc.com/docs/DOC-28417 Or look for Amigo in the community search to see which other products we offer this for. Regards Paul -- View this message in context: http://ars-action-request-system.1.n7.nabble.com/BMC-should-have-made-upgrades-easier-Customers-loosing-interests-tp116120p116154.html Sent from the ARS (Action Request System) mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Jim, Andrew, Yes, Flash is pretty awful. I don't know why it isn't dead yet - I can only assume it's easy to find cheap resource to build noddy applications. I regularly get cross when various streaming services (and BBC iPlayer) stop working when my Linux box decides to update Flash, and maybe it's those types of service that allow it to live on? John ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Completely agree. HTML 5 + CSS + standard JavaScript ui libs like jquery is the way to go. Also dev studio badly needs to get away from these horrendous grid layout hacks. Since aruser is apparently abandonware at this point, we are presumably 100% in the web GUI business. Might as well do that the right way. My unsolicited two cents. I now return you to your regularly scheduled off topic thread :-) Andy On Thursday, March 13, 2014, Jim Coryat (jcoryat) jcor...@micron.com wrote: John, The pieces written in flash are constant pain in my side. I would rather they go the other way and get rid of flash in the product entirely. Anyone with any degree of intelligence will look past the glitz of sales and marketing and look to what the product really provides. Flash IMHO just slows down the performance of the product as a whole. Jim Coryat Senior Software Engineer Micron Technology, Inc. -Original Message- From: John Baker [mailto:jba...@javasystemsolutions.com javascript:;] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 1:54 PM Subject: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hello I can state that JSS loses customers because they move from BMC to elsewhere. When a customer doesn't renew support, I make a point of asking them why and it's almost always because the BMC platform has been canned. But SNOW isn't always the destination of choice. There have been a few cases of a customer taking their SSO Plugin for BMC license to their shiny new HP ITSM system, ie one problem solved and the migration effort reduced. BMC have no interest in AR System beyond ITSM, that much has been obvious for years and to be fair, it makes good business sense. The world is full of easy to use programming languages and workflow style products, so why try to compete with low cost/free solutions? What puzzles me is why AR System still exists given the numerous issues reported to this list - why hasn't BMC bitten the bullet and gotten rid of the parts not already written in Flash? I'm not suggesting it's a smart option, because customising ITSM is a useful sales point, but it's easy to script Python and modern, transactional database technology is available for free. I used SNOW the other day. I selected a category and waited for workflow to fire - it reminded me of Mid Tier 5.1, ie abysmal performance. It's not all that great, but sadly, neither is the ITSM installation process. John ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Vivek, Is this all included as part of our support agreement? Jim Coryat Senior Software Engineer Micron Technology, Inc. -Original Message- From: Vivek Patil [mailto:vivek_pa...@bmc.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 12:05 AM Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hi All, BMC has a dedicated AMIGO Team to assist and guide customers in their upgrade plan . If needed , ITSM Customer Engineering [ i mean RD ] Team will step in to unblock customer upgrade issue . With 8.1 SP1 , we have shipped CONFIGCHECKER tool ; previously known as pre-checker . a] Tool and its read-me file is available within the AR 8.1 SP1 installer zip . b] Before one starts the fresh install or upgrade , one can execute all checks using the config checker . c] It checks configurations as well as ITSM Id violations which will point out the violations if any. d] This way , most of the install upgrade issues are fixed before starting the upgrade. e] There is BPCU Tool to find out improper customizations and fix them before upgrade. **IMPORTANT** : 1] We have published Cook-book for ITSM Suite 81 Upgrade document on BMC Remedy Community group. Please click here to check the BMC Community blog post : https://communities.bmc.com/community/bmcdn/bmc_it_service_support/blog/2013/08/07/upgrading-to-bmc-remedy-81-things-that-you-really-need-to-know 2] AMIGO Assistance Program FAQ's : A] Do we have any template for the data we need from customers ? ## BMC AMIGO team has developed a collateral that we will be providing customers and using this collateral the expectation is that customer will describe the a detailed upgrade plan. Once the plan has been developed they will come back to BMC Support and our AMIGO team will review their detailed plan and provide feedback on any red flags and/or reinforce crucial steps of the upgrade. B] Where can we track/check all this data ? Will it be the BMC communities or a dedicated AMIGO site having the current status for each AMIGO support case. ## In the AMIGO process customers will contact Support via a Support ticket and these tickets will be tagged with the keyword AMIGO in the Memo field and this how it is tracked. We look forward to help customers in the upgrade or migration to latest 8.1 SP1 ITSM Suite . Thanks, Vivek Patil Disclaimer: a] This document compliments and DOES NOT replace the existing product documentation. Please follow the blog post to receive more updates. b] The opinions, statements, and/or suggested courses of action expressed in this E-mail do not necessarily reflect those of BMC Software, Inc. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Hi All, BMC has a dedicated AMIGO Team to assist and guide customers in their upgrade plan . If needed , ITSM Customer Engineering [ i mean RD ] Team will step in to unblock customer upgrade issue . With 8.1 SP1 , we have shipped CONFIGCHECKER tool ; previously known as pre-checker . a] Tool and its read-me file is available within the AR 8.1 SP1 installer zip . b] Before one starts the fresh install or upgrade , one can execute all checks using the config checker . c] It checks configurations as well as ITSM Id violations which will point out the violations if any. d] This way , most of the install upgrade issues are fixed before starting the upgrade. e] There is BPCU Tool to find out improper customizations and fix them before upgrade. **IMPORTANT** : 1] We have published Cook-book for ITSM Suite 81 Upgrade document on BMC Remedy Community group. Please click here to check the BMC Community blog post : https://communities.bmc.com/community/bmcdn/bmc_it_service_support/blog/2013/08/07/upgrading-to-bmc-remedy-81-things-that-you-really-need-to-know 2] AMIGO Assistance Program FAQ's : A] Do we have any template for the data we need from customers ? ## BMC AMIGO team has developed a collateral that we will be providing customers and using this collateral the expectation is that customer will describe the a detailed upgrade plan. Once the plan has been developed they will come back to BMC Support and our AMIGO team will review their detailed plan and provide feedback on any red flags and/or reinforce crucial steps of the upgrade. B] Where can we track/check all this data ? Will it be the BMC communities or a dedicated AMIGO site having the current status for each AMIGO support case. ## In the AMIGO process customers will contact Support via a Support ticket and these tickets will be tagged with the keyword AMIGO in the Memo field and this how it is tracked. We look forward to help customers in the upgrade or migration to latest 8.1 SP1 ITSM Suite . Thanks, Vivek Patil Disclaimer: a] This document compliments and DOES NOT replace the existing product documentation. Please follow the blog post to receive more updates. b] The opinions, statements, and/or suggested courses of action expressed in this E-mail do not necessarily reflect those of BMC Software, Inc. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
There aren't many moving from snow to bmc. It's more common the other way around. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 20:32, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
If you want the benefits of BMC and zero time upgrades I would suggest looking into BMC Remedyforce. This is BMC's true cloud ITSM which is upgraded 3 times a year and built on the Salesforce Platform. Chris Grassi -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 8:31 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Not exactly the best cloud ITSM solution though. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 11 Mar 2014, at 11:11, Grassi, Christopher cgra...@columnit.com wrote: If you want the benefits of BMC and zero time upgrades I would suggest looking into BMC Remedyforce. This is BMC's true cloud ITSM which is upgraded 3 times a year and built on the Salesforce Platform. Chris Grassi -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 8:31 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Lol Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 19:31, John Sundberg john.sundb...@kineticdata.com wrote: ** A debate would be good. But I doubt you could you find anybody to defend the BMC approach. Debate is now done. -John On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:24 PM, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years -- John Sundberg Kinetic Data, Inc. Your Business. Your Process. 651-556-0930 I john.sundb...@kineticdata.com www.kineticdata.com I community.kineticdata.com _ARSlist: Where the Answers Are and have been for 20 years_ ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
You get two instances with Servicenow so you can tweak one while running the other Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 19:36, Richter, Howard (CEI - Atlanta) howard.rich...@coxinc.com wrote: ** I know we are talking about Remedy vs ServiceNow, what about other large apps like PeopleSoft or SAP. Not one to defend the BMC upgrade process, but as we know customization or integrations always throw a wrench in to any upgrade. I do wonder how the zero downtime upgrade works with customizations or integrations that might need to be tuned. Just saying….. hbr From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of John Sundberg Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 3:27 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: [arslist] BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests ** A debate would be good. But I doubt you could you find anybody to defend the BMC approach. Debate is now done. -John On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:24 PM, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years -- John Sundberg Kinetic Data, Inc. Your Business. Your Process. 651-556-0930 I john.sundb...@kineticdata.com www.kineticdata.com I community.kineticdata.com _ARSlist: Where the Answers Are and have been for 20 years_ Click here to report this email as spam. _ARSlist: Where the Answers Are and have been for 20 years_ ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
They have two instances at database layer but now sure about the application layer.They keep the backup on on secondary database on transactional basis. We can have that too in remedy. What makes you feel that BMC does not provide best ITSM solutions ? I feel it does. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
With BMC having a much larger market share that's to be expected though isn't it? Also, the companies I've seen that go BMC - SNOW generally follow a pattern like this: 1) Company is on an old version of ARS with custom apps and an understaffed development team. 2) Company decides to try the latest release of BMC's ITSM, don't train their team or replace them with experienced ITSM administrators. 3) They get ITSM into production after a lot of pain and agony, with the ARS developer being unable to adapt to working with ITSM, and the owners of the ITSM processes not having an understanding of ITIL. 4) Service Now comes along with a canned sales script that exploits knowledge of the preceding failure and promises to make everything better, and makes an easy sale. What happens next varies, because some people are happy with SNOW and stick with it. In the scenario above, it's dangerous for SNOW as well because most likely they get rid of their Remedy resource who was probably the closest person to understanding the concepts of IT Service Management, or they try to put them on SNOW without proper training and guidance from an experienced SNOW consultant and while it works for a while, they are unable to do as much with it as the sales person promised. As a result, they're just as likely to get upset at Service Now because things aren't magically happening perfectly after they spent all sorts of money and failed to deliver a second time. What ITSM software vendors don't usually tell you is that software is tertiary. If you have good processes and competent, experienced, well trained people first you could probably do ITSM with an Access database. If you have bad processes, or incompetent, untrained staff, you could spend millions on an ITSM solution and it still won't work. I've seen companies flail around going from custom ARS applications to SNOW to ITSM and still look for something new to go to because it's a lot easier to replace software than fix processes or educate and properly place your staff. Nowhere that I've worked, mind you, but it does happen. :-) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of stephen leith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:52 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests There aren't many moving from snow to bmc. It's more common the other way around. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 20:32, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. __ _ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Shawn, Well said. hbr -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Pierson, Shawn Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 9:22 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: [arslist] BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests With BMC having a much larger market share that's to be expected though isn't it? Also, the companies I've seen that go BMC - SNOW generally follow a pattern like this: 1) Company is on an old version of ARS with custom apps and an understaffed development team. 2) Company decides to try the latest release of BMC's ITSM, don't train their team or replace them with experienced ITSM administrators. 3) They get ITSM into production after a lot of pain and agony, with the ARS developer being unable to adapt to working with ITSM, and the owners of the ITSM processes not having an understanding of ITIL. 4) Service Now comes along with a canned sales script that exploits knowledge of the preceding failure and promises to make everything better, and makes an easy sale. What happens next varies, because some people are happy with SNOW and stick with it. In the scenario above, it's dangerous for SNOW as well because most likely they get rid of their Remedy resource who was probably the closest person to understanding the concepts of IT Service Management, or they try to put them on SNOW without proper training and guidance from an experienced SNOW consultant and while it works for a while, they are unable to do as much with it as the sales person promised. As a result, they're just as likely to get upset at Service Now because things aren't magically happening perfectly after they spent all sorts of money and failed to deliver a second time. What ITSM software vendors don't usually tell you is that software is tertiary. If you have good processes and competent, experienced, well trained people first you could probably do ITSM with an Access database. If you have bad processes, or incompetent, untrained staff, you could spend millions on an ITSM solution and it still won't work. I've seen companies flail around going from custom ARS applications to SNOW to ITSM and still look for something new to go to because it's a lot easier to replace software than fix processes or educate and properly place your staff. Nowhere that I've worked, mind you, but it does happen. :-) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of stephen leith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:52 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests There aren't many moving from snow to bmc. It's more common the other way around. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 20:32, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. __ _ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Very well said! They say captain is as good as his team, well, your IT is as good as people who run it :) -Raj From: Pierson, Shawn-3 [via ARS (Action Request System)] [mailto:ml-node+s1n116108...@n7.nabble.com] Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 18:52 To: Hiremath, Rajashekhar Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests With BMC having a much larger market share that's to be expected though isn't it? Also, the companies I've seen that go BMC - SNOW generally follow a pattern like this: 1) Company is on an old version of ARS with custom apps and an understaffed development team. 2) Company decides to try the latest release of BMC's ITSM, don't train their team or replace them with experienced ITSM administrators. 3) They get ITSM into production after a lot of pain and agony, with the ARS developer being unable to adapt to working with ITSM, and the owners of the ITSM processes not having an understanding of ITIL. 4) Service Now comes along with a canned sales script that exploits knowledge of the preceding failure and promises to make everything better, and makes an easy sale. What happens next varies, because some people are happy with SNOW and stick with it. In the scenario above, it's dangerous for SNOW as well because most likely they get rid of their Remedy resource who was probably the closest person to understanding the concepts of IT Service Management, or they try to put them on SNOW without proper training and guidance from an experienced SNOW consultant and while it works for a while, they are unable to do as much with it as the sales person promised. As a result, they're just as likely to get upset at Service Now because things aren't magically happening perfectly after they spent all sorts of money and failed to deliver a second time. What ITSM software vendors don't usually tell you is that software is tertiary. If you have good processes and competent, experienced, well trained people first you could probably do ITSM with an Access database. If you have bad processes, or incompetent, untrained staff, you could spend millions on an ITSM solution and it still won't work. I've seen companies flail around going from custom ARS applications to SNOW to ITSM and still look for something new to go to because it's a lot easier to replace software than fix processes or educate and properly place your staff. Nowhere that I've worked, mind you, but it does happen. :-) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[hidden email]/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=116108i=0] On Behalf Of stephen leith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:52 AM To: [hidden email]/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=116108i=1 Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests There aren't many moving from snow to bmc. It's more common the other way around. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 20:32, James Smith [hidden email]/user/SendEmail.jtp?type=nodenode=116108i=2 wrote: I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. __ _ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.orghttp://www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.orghttp://www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.orghttp://www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years If you reply to this email, your message will be added to the discussion below: http://ars-action-request-system.1.n7.nabble.com/BMC-should-have-made-upgrades-easier-Customers-loosing-interests-tp116091p116108.html To start a new topic under ARS (Action Request System), email ml-node+s1n2...@n7.nabble.commailto:ml
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Very nicely said, Shawn. I worked in a place where the Remedy ITSM system was not properly staffed and was having several outages on a daily basis. A lot of money had been invested into the system and the results were not what they expected. When I joined that company, I was given notice that they were considering HP's ITSM as a replacement if I didn't get current system fixed ASAP. I explained that they simply had a resource issue and that their strategy was like replacing a detuned Mercedes Benz with a Yugo. Did they want a piece of junk or the finest automobile on the market? I told them that they just needed a good mechanic to fix their Benz, which is what happened. A lack of proper resources was the main issue, not the application itself. -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Pierson, Shawn Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 8:22 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests With BMC having a much larger market share that's to be expected though isn't it? Also, the companies I've seen that go BMC - SNOW generally follow a pattern like this: 1) Company is on an old version of ARS with custom apps and an understaffed development team. 2) Company decides to try the latest release of BMC's ITSM, don't train their team or replace them with experienced ITSM administrators. 3) They get ITSM into production after a lot of pain and agony, with the ARS developer being unable to adapt to working with ITSM, and the owners of the ITSM processes not having an understanding of ITIL. 4) Service Now comes along with a canned sales script that exploits knowledge of the preceding failure and promises to make everything better, and makes an easy sale. What happens next varies, because some people are happy with SNOW and stick with it. In the scenario above, it's dangerous for SNOW as well because most likely they get rid of their Remedy resource who was probably the closest person to understanding the concepts of IT Service Management, or they try to put them on SNOW without proper training and guidance from an experienced SNOW consultant and while it works for a while, they are unable to do as much with it as the sales person promised. As a result, they're just as likely to get upset at Service Now because things aren't magically happening perfectly after they spent all sorts of money and failed to deliver a second time. What ITSM software vendors don't usually tell you is that software is tertiary. If you have good processes and competent, experienced, well trained people first you could probably do ITSM with an Access database. If you have bad processes, or incompetent, untrained staff, you could spend millions on an ITSM solution and it still won't work. I've seen companies flail around going from custom ARS applications to SNOW to ITSM and still look for something new to go to because it's a lot easier to replace software than fix processes or educate and properly place your staff. Nowhere that I've worked, mind you, but it does happen. :-) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of stephen leith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:52 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests There aren't many moving from snow to bmc. It's more common the other way around. Kind regards. Stephen Leith On 10 Mar 2014, at 20:32, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. __ _ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
All, The common theme here is getting the correct resources to install and then maintain the system. Too many times (as Jesus said), the company buys a Mercedes Benz and then uses a Yugo mechanic and parts to keep it going. Then companies like Service Now, finds its opening to replace ITSM. However, there is someone that can help. That is BMC. They need to give us better tools (i.e. better support, training that is worth it), more and better upgrade paths, mini training VMs (with time bombs) so the community can do a little playing with a new release and therefor to look more intelligent to our customers and documentation that is easy to get to (maybe there could be an app for that). Also one additional note on the training, why is it not released before the product?? It comes out months after the release and at times after a dot release that is then not covered. Once again by making the Remedy Technologist look bad or uninformed and BMC give more ammo to company's like Service Now, when its community has no knowledge on upgrades or new products. Just my thoughts and not worth the penny they cost, Howard -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Ortega, Jesus A Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 10:18 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: [arslist] BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Very nicely said, Shawn. I worked in a place where the Remedy ITSM system was not properly staffed and was having several outages on a daily basis. A lot of money had been invested into the system and the results were not what they expected. When I joined that company, I was given notice that they were considering HP's ITSM as a replacement if I didn't get current system fixed ASAP. I explained that they simply had a resource issue and that their strategy was like replacing a detuned Mercedes Benz with a Yugo. Did they want a piece of junk or the finest automobile on the market? I told them that they just needed a good mechanic to fix their Benz, which is what happened. A lack of proper resources was the main issue, not the application itself. -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Pierson, Shawn Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 8:22 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests With BMC having a much larger market share that's to be expected though isn't it? Also, the companies I've seen that go BMC - SNOW generally follow a pattern like this: 1) Company is on an old version of ARS with custom apps and an understaffed development team. 2) Company decides to try the latest release of BMC's ITSM, don't train their team or replace them with experienced ITSM administrators. 3) They get ITSM into production after a lot of pain and agony, with the ARS developer being unable to adapt to working with ITSM, and the owners of the ITSM processes not having an understanding of ITIL. 4) Service Now comes along with a canned sales script that exploits knowledge of the preceding failure and promises to make everything better, and makes an easy sale. What happens next varies, because some people are happy with SNOW and stick with it. In the scenario above, it's dangerous for SNOW as well because most likely they get rid of their Remedy resource who was probably the closest person to understanding the concepts of IT Service Management, or they try to put them on SNOW without proper training and guidance from an experienced SNOW consultant and while it works for a while, they are unable to do as much with it as the sales person promised. As a result, they're just as likely to get upset at Service Now because things aren't magically happening perfectly after they spent all sorts of money and failed to deliver a second time. What ITSM software vendors don't usually tell you is that software is tertiary. If you have good processes and competent, experienced, well trained people first you could probably do ITSM with an Access database. If you have bad processes, or incompetent, untrained staff, you could spend millions on an ITSM solution and it still won't work. I've seen companies flail around going from custom ARS applications to SNOW to ITSM and still look for something new to go to because it's a lot easier to replace software than fix processes or educate and properly place your staff. Nowhere that I've worked, mind you, but it does happen. :-) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of stephen leith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 5:52 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests There aren't many moving from snow to bmc
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
I agree. Bad resources lead to the failure of projects. I got some link which shows pitfalls in service now http://seekingalpha.com/article/961-after-interviewing-more-industry-insiders-i-am-even-more-bearish-on-servicenow Worth reading ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Great debate here and have a thought on education. If BMC offered the Using (WBT) courses for free or under some kind of site license agreement, maybe under your support ID, that would be huge in winning over management and users. Even a scaled down version that covers most of the first use issues would be better than nothing. Sure there is cost with creating one of these courses but the ROI from lower churn would even that out. The downside would be having users that might know more than we do on a particular application or feature. Mark -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:32 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests I agree. Bad resources lead to the failure of projects. I got some link which shows pitfalls in service now http://seekingalpha.com/article/961-after-interviewing-more-industry-insiders-i-am-even-more-bearish-on-servicenow Worth reading ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain Time Warner Cable proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to Time Warner Cable. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
This debate can go on for week, however, Mark you reminded me of something that I see happing and at times BMC sales is the root cause. A number of times, BMC sales will meet with the companies Managment and provide information that might be too good. Without the companies (or even a BMC) technical resource in the room. Then us on the technical side must come up to speed (on our own) or debunk, the info that was passed on to the Management team. Those conversations never go well. Instead of partnering with the technical resource in a company, BMC at times seems to circumvent this powerful resource. I am not sure if it's on propose or just a matter of timing, however, it does/is happing. I wonder why the technical side of the sales team is not reaching out to the technical side of our world. That reaching out would be key to success of any project or upgrade. As we have been saying without us, the customers will find another product. Howard -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Brittain, Mark Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 12:56 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: [arslist] BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Great debate here and have a thought on education. If BMC offered the Using (WBT) courses for free or under some kind of site license agreement, maybe under your support ID, that would be huge in winning over management and users. Even a scaled down version that covers most of the first use issues would be better than nothing. Sure there is cost with creating one of these courses but the ROI from lower churn would even that out. The downside would be having users that might know more than we do on a particular application or feature. Mark -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 11:32 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests I agree. Bad resources lead to the failure of projects. I got some link which shows pitfalls in service now http://seekingalpha.com/article/961-after-interviewing-more-industry-insiders-i-am-even-more-bearish-on-servicenow Worth reading ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years This E-mail and any of its attachments may contain Time Warner Cable proprietary information, which is privileged, confidential, or subject to copyright belonging to Time Warner Cable. This E-mail is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient of this E-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying, or action taken in relation to the contents of and attachments to this E-mail is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this E-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and permanently delete the original and any copy of this E-mail and any printout. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
I don't really have the time for this, but let me jump into the fray with a few somewhat related but disparate points of my own... First, with regard to the bad resources issue, I've been seeing pattern for years. On three separate occasions in my career as a Remedy Developer contractor, I've been brought in by clients who had a custom Remedy application which were in varying degrees of being train wrecks. The types of problems included extremely poor data architecture, hundreds of forms and many with no use (and names such as Test *in production*), thousands of workflow objects with no use and no useful naming conventions, escalations spinning out of control, etc. In two cases I was able to tame the systems, but in one case it was so bad I outright refused to even try (I suggested they either find another resource or allow me to build a new system from scratch..fortunately they chose the latter). I came to realize that there were two main factors that had enabled these situations. First, the fact that the Remedy ARS system makes it so easy to perform development operations - create forms, create workflow that does useful things, etc. - that many people who have no business architecting and developing applications where doing just that. In candid conversations with clients, I've describe this situation by saying that any idiot can develop in Remedy, and unfortunately many of them do. This was compound by second factor, which is (was) the confusion Remedy themselves created in the early days by collapsing the notions of administrator and developer. When I was originally taught to use Remedy, the topics about how to install configure Remedy were taught right along side the topics about how to create forms and workflow. The documentation largely followed suit. In fact it's only relatively recently that the main development tool actually has the word develop in its name and is *not *the (BMC) Remedy *Administrator*. So these Remedy administrators - people who perhaps had the background to understand and been taught to perform actual administrative tasks - were then asked to implement changes to the system because, in everyone's mind, the notion of Remedy administration naturally extended to performing such changes. These people then go on to create a few forms and some workflow successfully. They created their Customer form and they created their Inventory form and some workflow around all of this. And, at first, everyone's happy because they were able to get this done so quickly. Time goes on and they're repeatedly asked to extend the system, and for a while everyone remains happy. What happens next (which is what happened in each of those three train wreck systems I've described) is that at some point the system grows beyond the developer's ability to manage. In my experience it seems to happen somewhere around a few tens of forms and perhaps a few hundred logic objects. In all cases by the time I was brought in the original developers were gone, but my own forensic analysis of those systems suggested to me that at this point in the growth of the application the original developer was no longer able to fully comprehend what was going on. Before this point they were able to keep it all in there head and knew where to find things, but at this point the system just became too large for this approach, and their lack of skill and coding discipline (e.g. good naming conventions) meant they had no other recourse. Problems (bugs) would occur but the developer was unable to debug the problem. And instead of identifying and correcting the root cause (which in many cases were due to fundamental problems with the data architecture), the developer would add a patch to fix the problem: e.g. the client expected the result to be 100, so they add a filter to set it to 100 at the end. So instead of *reducing *the problem set, these developers actually expanded it. This pattern would continue for a while until the momentum of the system eventually ground to a halt, leaving a barely functioning system on which no one present could implement any changes for fear of making it worse and the client complaining loudly that none of their changes, even simple ones, were not being done. I've only been occasionally or peripherally involved with the canned apps - what's ITSM now, and what were the component apps (e.g. Help Desk) a long time ago - but from what I've seen the pattern there was similar: people with administrator level skills at best were asked to implement changes, and for the same reasons eventually reducing the system to being unchangeable and largely unusable. And the nearly indelible feeling that everyone - the users and management understandably, and even some of these so-called developers (not so understandably) - takes away from this experience is that Remedy sucks. Does this sound familiar? It's all really unfortunately because the problem of course has nothing to do with the core
BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Hello I can state that JSS loses customers because they move from BMC to elsewhere. When a customer doesn't renew support, I make a point of asking them why and it's almost always because the BMC platform has been canned. But SNOW isn't always the destination of choice. There have been a few cases of a customer taking their SSO Plugin for BMC license to their shiny new HP ITSM system, ie one problem solved and the migration effort reduced. BMC have no interest in AR System beyond ITSM, that much has been obvious for years and to be fair, it makes good business sense. The world is full of easy to use programming languages and workflow style products, so why try to compete with low cost/free solutions? What puzzles me is why AR System still exists given the numerous issues reported to this list - why hasn't BMC bitten the bullet and gotten rid of the parts not already written in Flash? I'm not suggesting it's a smart option, because customising ITSM is a useful sales point, but it's easy to script Python and modern, transactional database technology is available for free. I used SNOW the other day. I selected a category and waited for workflow to fire - it reminded me of Mid Tier 5.1, ie abysmal performance. It's not all that great, but sadly, neither is the ITSM installation process. John ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
A debate would be good. But I doubt you could you find anybody to defend the BMC approach. Debate is now done. -John On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:24 PM, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.comwrote: Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years -- *John Sundberg* Kinetic Data, Inc. Your Business. Your Process. 651-556-0930 I john.sundb...@kineticdata.com www.kineticdata.com I community.kineticdata.com ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
I know we are talking about Remedy vs ServiceNow, what about other large apps like PeopleSoft or SAP. Not one to defend the BMC upgrade process, but as we know customization or integrations always throw a wrench in to any upgrade. I do wonder how the zero downtime upgrade works with customizations or integrations that might need to be tuned. Just saying. hbr From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of John Sundberg Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 3:27 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: [arslist] BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests ** A debate would be good. But I doubt you could you find anybody to defend the BMC approach. Debate is now done. -John On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 2:24 PM, James Smith bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.commailto:bmcremedyarslis...@gmail.com wrote: Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.orghttp://www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years -- John Sundberg Kinetic Data, Inc. Your Business. Your Process. 651-556-0930 I john.sundb...@kineticdata.commailto:john.sundb...@kineticdata.com www.kineticdata.comhttp://www.kineticdata.com/ I community.kineticdata.comhttp://community.kineticdata.com/ _ARSlist: Where the Answers Are and have been for 20 years_ Click herehttps://www.mailcontrol.com/sr/ZdPCQyWd!M!GX2PQPOmvUtVTDJsKpCsgRLXGIyyPnZivaej!eygtS6jUgWJu9HivP4yrEJrBFUSOdoKZwoXR0w== to report this email as spam. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
If it were easy to do, people like us wouldn't have jobs. You have to keep in mind that with Service Now your customizations are done with Java, not a nice GUI like ARS. When Service Now promises you a Zero Down Time migration we all know that there is still the long implementation path to work through where they are re-coding and migrating your custom workflow. While they tell you that they will be done in a short time period, it may not be as quick as you'd like. You may expect to have the newest version in 3 months, but with your customizations in play, it would be 9 months. Yes, you might be down for a shorter period of time, but you will have to wait a long time until their developers finish the work of upgrading your site. You lose control over the process as well since SNOW is doing the work on their end and I am sure you will have to wait in line. If you end up hiring Developers and admins to do the work what's the point of having a SAAS? I bet Doug could provide some statistics about companies that have jumped ship and are coming back to Remedy after finding out that they were SNOW Blinded by marketing. I bet that if you look on the Service Now web page and look at those companies that they have on their page as users, a lot of those have switched back. You get what you paid for. -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 2:24 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Information contained in this email is subject to the disclaimer found by clicking on the following link: http://www.lyondellbasell.com/Footer/Disclaimer/ ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
Howard, That a good question but I too do not have answer for that. I should have asked my customers about that. Maybe they are using some different techniques which is not publicly shared. God knows... I am a core remedy resource and am very much concerned about it. I do not want my customers to loose to service now. Just wanted to bring this to List that I am facing this situation. I hope BMC is planning something big in next release. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
I'll step in to defend BMC in this regard, acknowledging that I've had issues with various decisions that BMC has made in the past. However, we are running ITSM 8.1 in production, and it was a lot easier than going to 7.6.4 from an earlier hybrid 7.x version that we had. To be clear, with three technical people, we completed an upgrade in place on super bowl weekend and were still able to watch the super bowl. I single-handedly installed everything, then my two colleagues jumped in and we fixed the overlays and worked on the customizations we had made specifically for 8.1. Probably the most work intensive thing after the installs was that one of my colleagues spent a few hours replacing our custom email processing system with an overhauled version of the Rules Based Email engine. We also have a very customized outgoing email system using HTML templates and code to display data from things that aren't on the same form (e.g. showing Tasks related to a Change Request on an Approval email, which uses a custom approval process that can update Work Info on a Change Request from the email, even with attachments.) We also have a lot of well-designed customizations and non-OOtB configurations. We have a third party SSO tool. We have a highly enhanced version of BMC Analytics. From my perspective, the biggest issue we ran into that didn't come up in testing was the Mid Tier performance and browser caching issues. We also shot ourselves in the foot when one of the developers turned on Developer Mode Caching and forgot to turn it off. However, in the grand scheme of things these were solved either easily on our part or by applying patches and hotfixes from BMC. It was frustrating to have any issues whatsoever, but any enterprise application is going to be difficult to upgrade. There are things I still don't like about the overlays, but now that I'm used to them, I think they save us a lot of work with our customizations. Maybe the process would be different to some degree if we were hosted by BMC, but we have no plan to go to RoD in the near future (I am not saying it's bad, just that it isn't a model we do a lot with right now.) So from the perspective of my company, we're fairly happy as BMC customers with the upgrade process. I've seen demos of Service Now and I admit that I like a lot of things about it, but I still think Remedy is easily a better fit for most companies. The few things that I liked better about Service Now seem like they're being addressed by BMC. If you have a sales person ask them if they can get you to one of their customer briefings or something else to see what they're working on. I can't speak to the zero downtime upgrade model for any product because I've not experienced that and I'm highly skeptical that any vendor could pull that off on any system with a lot of customizations, but being able to do a major upgrade on premise over the course of a weekend with three guys doesn't sound too bad to me. I even kicked off the first installer over VPN from my cellphone on my ride home (someone else was driving, of course.) Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Energy Transfer -Original Message- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of James Smith Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 2:24 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests Hi List, BMC made the upgrade process so complex that customer are scared to upgrade to new versions. Upgrade is eating almost a year to move to 8.1 with data migrations and all integrations. In the past we used to upgrade on the existing server only which was easy but there was a risk in loosing a customization. But that was easy process and we need not had to bother about data migrations here. In upgrade data migration is something like a challenging thing. I understand BMC made this change to preserve customizations and introduced the concept of overlays but still its not convencing the customers. Customers are not bothered about any customization and preservation as they have assigned a team to handle that. Only thing they care about is time, money and data. This is one of the main reason some of my company clients moved to Service Now as they are offering zero down time upgrades with no risk of loosing customization. There must be a debate on this, Remedy or ServiceNow. Regards JS ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.energytransfer.com/mail_disclaimer.aspx . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers
Re: BMC should have made upgrades easier - Customers loosing interests
I have seen the service now UI, they have everything on singe UI say user access, import and export, workflow development. UI is mot attractive and its very clumsy. Its very though for the non programmers to develop workflows or do customizations as at some point you need to know java scripting. In remedy, customizations and integrations are very simple. You have a great tool (Developer Studio) to do all customizations which is pretty cool and I like it. But as I said customers dnt see this. As per the last two posts from shown and jejus, it seems that upgrades are failing due to lack of knowlege of the person doing things. I am eager to hear the stories of client who moved from SNow to Remedy. ___ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years
