Are you an existing BMC customer considering a move to BMC Helix SaaS? Or a prospective customer deciding between an on-premises or SaaS deployment and need some guidance? Then this blog may help you decide which delivery model best suits you and your organization.
Let me begin by outlining very simply what the SaaS value proposition is by categorizing the two main benefits: the operational efficiency of not needing to run the BMC Helix application day-to-day and gaining faster access to BMC’s rapid rate of innovation. From my experience, customers will often place too much emphasis on the first point and neglect to consider the much greater benefit of the second point. Both are important, and together they form a compelling business case.
Operational efficiency
Customers running an on-premises model cannot take advantage of the same economy-of-scale benefits as an organization running BMC SaaS. Here is a set of common cost challenges that they face:
- Cost of infrastructure: While infrastructure is becoming more of a commodity and is much more affordable than it once was, ServiceOps use cases are becoming more advanced and require more powerful compute to function. This is particularly true of use cases that crunch a lot of data, such as proactive problem management and associated AIOps tools.
- New infrastructure skills: Running modern applications like BMC Helix, which take advantage of new innovative infrastructure like containers and serverless technologies, requires investment in a completely new set of skills. Think about how far infrastructure innovation has come over the past several years. How does an organization future-proof itself against requiring new skillsets in the future?
- Effort to support and maintain the platform: This refers to the other overheads associated with running the application, i.e., application patching, vulnerability management and zero-day vulnerabilities, upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, etc.
All these challenges can be eliminated with a move to the world-class BMC Helix SaaS solution.
The operational efficiency gains focus on the cost benefits of SaaS versus on-premises and are an important cornerstone to the business case, however, it is the next area, faster access to innovation, that provides significant benefits that will contribute to an organization’s digital transformation agenda.
BMC continues to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver new innovation across BMC Helix. These use cases help our customers gain a competitive edge by making them more agile and by improving the customer and end-user experience. Next, let’s explore why an on-premises customer might struggle to take advantage of this rapid rate of innovation:
- Infrequent upgrades: The average upgrade time for an on-premises customer is 18 months, compared with closer to six months for a SaaS customer, and that will continue to fall with our move to push upgrades.
- Less flexibility: If an organization wants to take advantage of some of the aforementioned data-crunching use cases, then they might require more compute power. With SaaS, it is as easy as raising a request in our SaaS operations portal.
- Adoption and value realization: Running a complex on-premises application like BMC Helix requires highly skilled application specialists. It would be more beneficial if those expensive resources were focused on more value-add activities. Is there a new BMC Helix Innovation Suite app they could be developing to meet business requirements? Is there some new workflow they could be developing to automate request fulfilment or remediation? The SaaS option also includes a BMC Customers Success Manager who advocates for our customers and drives value adoption to assist with business outcomes.
Our customers tend to extract significantly more value when they leave the “run” to BMC and focus on yielding as much return as possible out of their investment.
To be clear, for our customers who require data to be housed onsite, we are pleased to continue providing our BMC Helix on-premises option.
In the last year alone, BMC has released over 130 new capabilities across the BMC Helix platform and we are not slowing down. Put yourself in the best position to rapidly take advantage of this continuous innovation. Choose SaaS!
To learn more, visit bmc.com/helix.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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