We built BMC Helix, our cloud-based Cognitive Service Management solution, to address today’s most non-negotiable business requirement: enabling digital transformation by re-engineering tools and processes. 70% of all digital transformation initiatives do not reach their goals. That is a serious issue that impacts the unified experiences customers and employees demand. We believe that BMC Helix can play a significant role in solving it.
BMC Helix now includes both ITSM and ITOM capabilities enabling organizations to proactively and predictively discover, monitor, optimize, remediate, and deliver an omni-channel service experience for IT and line-of-business.
The power of BMC Helix lies in its core components: the 3 Cs – Cognitive, Cloud, and Containers. In this blog, we’ll explore each one in detail and why it matters to your business.
#1: Cognitive: Delivering on the Promise of AI and Machine Learning
Service Management (CSM) embeds emerging technologies like AI and machine learning into every step of the service delivery lifecycle to increase productivity, accuracy, and speed while reducing costs.
With tech being a driver of change and also the thing being changed, business leaders know that growth and innovation requires a hard look at how service is delivered across the enterprise. CSM replaces outdated, manual processes with intelligence and automation to deliver smart, omni-channel experiences to both agents and end users.
BMC Helix prepares enterprises to transform their service management from being reactive to proactive and predictive with:
- Pervasive intelligence to see around corners
- A single view from the basement to the boardroom
- Consumer grade experiences for the enterprise
As these outcomes demonstrate, cognitive capabilities should be approached like any other aspect of IT: with a laser focus on business results versus technical features. While solutions from other vendors may claim cognitive functionality, it’s often a simple widget that’s more “shiny object” than “business game changer”. BMC Helix delivers on the opportunity of AI and more to truly impact your bottom line.
What does that look like in practice? The cognitive capabilities in BMC Helix essentially automate levels 0, 1, and 2 of your service delivery processes. Via intelligent chatbots, it speaks to users in natural, native language to determine how to best solve the issue. It runs through the same troubleshooting script as an agent to determine the source of the problem, intelligently searches and accesses its knowledge base to provide an answer, or routes the ticket to the correct level 3 resource. By automating the more mundane tasks, CSM frees up agents’ time to work on higher value initiatives while helping end users find answers and get back to work more quickly. As a result, users are more satisfied, and IT can more efficiently use its existing resources.
#2: Cloud: Everything-as-a-Service and Operating in the Multi-Cloud
At its core, this “C” represents the ability of BMC Helix to deliver everything as a service: Remedy-as-a-Service, Discovery-as-a-Service, Digital Workplace-as-a-Service, and Business Workflows-as-a-Service. The benefits of SaaS deployments are well-covered ground, but it’s worth emphasizing the importance of the everything-as-a-service (EaaS) model to modern Cognitive Service Management.
By running all these core products as a service, the enterprise gains the agility and speed to keep up with the pace of business. The EaaS model accelerates innovation, reduces infrastructure and operations costs, and makes it easier for end users and IT alike to consume services. It eliminates the overhead of upgrading, migrating, and managing legacy applications and requires no “ripping and replacing.” You’ve invested heavily in your IT infrastructure; with BMC Helix, you can continue to operate hybrid deployments, integrating where necessary into your multi-cloud environment.
Multi-cloud, in fact, is the other aspect of the “Cloud” pillar of BMC Helix. BMC Helix helps you achieve seamless operation across multi-cloud use cases. It runs on any type of public cloud, including AWS, Azure, and the BMC Cloud, making it an ideal fit for multi-cloud environments.
Each component supports your multi-cloud strategy in a unique way:
- BMC Helix Discovery: Deliver fast, accurate, and secure cloud and on-premises asset visibility.
- BMC Helix ITSM: SaaS-Based predictive IT service management for your modern enterprise.
- BMC Helix Business Workflows: Engaging omni-channel experiences that simplify the way business service gets delivered.
- BMC Helix Digital Workplace: Intelligent omni-channel experiences for the future of work.
- Helix Platform: Fast track app innovation – empower coders and non-coders to co-create apps in the cloud.
Working in concert, these products enables the benefits of BMC Helix to extend far beyond the service desk.
#3: Containers: More Flexibility, More Choice
Containers enable greater freedom and flexibility in today’s complex multi-cloud environments. Many people outside of IT, however, aren’t exactly sure what containers are, how they work, and why they should care, so let’s start there. Docker, a prominent container platform provider, defines containers as “a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.”
The container model offers a variety of benefits. Containers are significantly smaller than virtual machines, so take up less server space and can run much faster. They’re also modular. Developers can split an application into modules, such as the database, the application front-end, etc., and build and modify just the individual modules instead of the entire application (this is referred to as the microservices approach, which you’ll often hear in conjunction with conversations about containerization.) These modules and the containers themselves are very lightweight, so can be made available as soon as they’re required.
What does all of this mean for the business? In short, more easily customized and updated applications, served up more quickly and easily, with greater flexibility and freedom of choice. Using containers as a deployment model allows IT to leverage the cloud of their choice, make changes when necessary, and never lose the power and personalization of their applications. It’s no surprise that organizations are moving in this direction: a recent Gartner report predicted that “By 2023, more than 70% of global organizations will be running more than two containerized applications in production, up from less than 20% in 2019.”
Which brings us back to BMC Helix. Containers are the means by which BMC Helix delivers everything as a service. BMC Helix takes the latest and greatest innovations of our best products, like Remedy and Discovery, and packages them in a container that can be deployed in your cloud of choice. It eliminates deployment issues while adding critical multi-cloud management, so you gain agility and speed as well as efficiency and cost-savings. End users benefit as well, with automatic updates (just like consumer apps) that keep applications running at their peak.
These capabilities enable the most powerful outcome of BMC Helix: choice. With BMC Helix, you gain the ability to choose the cloud that you want, to dial up a service at a moment’s notice, to customize your services, to deliver and scale them as required at any given time – and to change any or all of those things whenever cost, compliance, or other factors demand it.
The Power of the 3Cs: Cognitive, Cloud, and Containers
Taken together, the 3 Cs reflect what BMC Helix is all about: meaningful business outcomes. As the first and only end-to-end service and operations SaaS platform that’s integrated with 360-degree intelligence, BMC Helix delivers on the promise of transformative technologies in a very real way. It enables you to consume services easily and manage your multi-cloud environment efficiently and effectively. By using containers as the deployment mechanism, it helps IT deliver the speed and scale of services that business today demands. Those are real business results. That’s BMC Helix.
