Altova DatabaseSpy vs. BMC Helix Remedyforce

Altova DatabaseSpy is well suited for dynamic environments that move quickly and have a need to develop and run small to medium-size ad-hoc queries quickly and easily. The tool is intuitive and relatively easy to learn and come up to speed. The tool may not be best suited for large and very large, and complex queries.

Incentivized

[BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.

Incentivized

• High performing system regardless of how many DBs are integrated
• Graphical DB design editor is useful for bird's eye view of the DB structure of the whole infrastructure
• Single point of reference / administration

Incentivized

• An admin user is able to quickly create a request definition with all of its components from one screen. We use to have to go to the 7 or 8 different screens to create each piece of the request definition.
• Ability to update multiple Incidents/Service Requests at once with the update button. This allows essentially an inline edit functionality within Remedyforce.
• Change management schedule is a great feature as well to be able to see how changes align and what there expected start dates/times are.

• Improved SQL query debugging capabilities
• Ability to nest queries
• Does not integrate with other DB administration tools or query tools

Incentivized

• The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created.
• Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak.
• Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work.

The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself

Incentivized

They care about your success.

Incentivized

Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.

Incentivized

For me, this is basically like mRemoteNG for databases. I mentioned this so people can have a general idea on one of its feature.

Incentivized

I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.

• Enabled us to continue to provide excellent customer support with a smaller team
• Lower cost helped us balance our budget
• Reduced the need for spending extra funds on training

Incentivized

• Remedyforce has allowed us to eliminate other solutions that provided similar features. By now using one true ITSM we have been able to save money which in higher education is always a concern.
• The reports and dashboards allow for a birds-eye view of our daily operations and provide managers and executives the information they need to make important cost saving decisions.