BMC Helix ITSM vs. OutSystems

BMC Helix ITSM fits our environment particularly well, where standardized, auditable processes are already in place: Incident and Problem Management can be structured cleanly, with clear ownership, escalations, and fully traceable documentation—crucial in a highly regulated banking context. Through the customer platform/portal, users can log incidents and requests consistently, track their status transparently, and use a single central communication channel across service boundaries. This supports a service-oriented setup spanning multiple business services and locations. It becomes less suitable—or at least more effort-intensive—when core foundation data is not yet stable: an immature CMDB, insufficient ITAM data quality, and an unstructured knowledge base limit the value of automation and self-service. In addition, heterogeneous integrations and strict authorization models can increase implementation and ongoing maintenance efforts, especially when SLAs are not harmonized across different customer environments.

Well suited for internal exposure of business processes (invoicing, API layer to other systems, customer maintenance etc), whether a UI is required or not. Not so well suited for full fledged web design. An OutSystems application must serve one particular business need, if gets too much functionalities and responsibilities it tends to get chaotic and complex.

Incentivized

• AI drive incident correlation leading to identifying problems and major incidents quickly.
• Digital Workplace gives end-users a modern and personalized UI to submit requests, monitor service health, and receive self-help.
• As an enterprise ITSM, it is critical that Request, Incident, Problem, Asset, and Change Management are integrated and flow together. BMC Helix is built on this principle.

Incentivized

• Developing end user interfaces with ease and speed with a modern look and feel.
• First class low code development to reduce time to market with visual programming
• Their technical support team is fast and responsive. We've yet to have any issues they could not resolve.

Incentivized

• Service Level management configs can be lengthy, and when changes are needed to specific SLA, it does take a long time to configure. Templates work but only for certain things, lots of manual work is still required.
• The Online product documentation can be confusing or in same cases not correct.
• BMC products are sometimes expensive. When partners try to resell licenses or increase their own allotment, it becomes very expensive.

Incentivized

• Price – The licensing model of OutSystems is very expensive and not suitable for small scale developments. This is offset by the time to develop and stability for larger scale developments
• Flexibility on PaaS version – The PaaS hosted version of OutSystems limits your flexibility to access the front end and backend database systems which can significantly restrict your options on high data volume developments or where anything requiring slightly out of the ordinary access is required
• Same price for PaaS and self-hosted system. Licensing model dictates that you pay the same price even when you host the system on your own hardware which effectively means you pay more to manage the infrastructure yourself

Incentivized

It provides the tool we need and is able to be customised to meet new requirements. Cost to change in training and integrations would be considerable.

We are very happy with OutSystems and our developers deliver good work. OutSystems lets us build new software on a regulare (2 weekly) basis, which is highly flexible and adjustable. Even without very much experience, our developers manage to build usefull software, which is working a lot better than our previous (legacy) software.

Overall the product enhances the capability of incident management, problem management and change management. The AI based framework helps generated better visibility and reports. The effectiveness of enhanced service desk suuport improves end user experience as the incidents are handled well in time and aged incidents are highlighted at the right time.

Incentivized

OutSystems has a feature in which we can develop a functionality in a application and can use that functionality in another application without developing it again. That is main plus point for the development team so they can work with different functionalities rather focusing on the same thing again and again. if we want to make any change on the user side then we can make it live with just the deployment using the service center.

Incentivized

for now we are satisfied. first two months 😉

Incentivized

could be faster. db is slower from introducing postgresql

Incentivized

Their tech support is top notch. They respond and get back to us, even on lower level incidents and issues, very quickly. It is rare that we deal with a support technician who does not know what they are doing.

The tech support is very reachable. Usually by [email] from but also by phone if needed. We had some difficulties at the start with understanding "what our machine was doing" under high performance load. After some good sessions understanding our needs they delivered good solutions for our problems we had in the beginning.

Excellent material full of hands on that improve the understanding of the platform.

the trainers dont have so much practical experiences. its mostly follow up and reading existing documentation withou own input. of course experiences people are on shore or have no free time. sad truth

Incentivized

The online training material is well designed and explanations are step by step, helping trainees to understand and follow each exercise and new concept.

Satisfied because I didn't have to do it!

Incentivized

In a large company, patiently and consistently work the behind the scenes politics with business and IT partners across the firm.
This is transformational - you will need a solid set of key business partners to lock arms together to move forward.

Incentivized

I believe Remedy's performance and market share exceeds its competitors. But it is worth mentioning that Microsoft's SCCM has excellent integration with Microsoft enterprise solutions and has is less expensive and not efficient. The IBM solution has better analytics but lacks the wide features and capabilities of Remedy. HP & CA are the real competitors for Remedy but lacks the stability, maturity, and effectiveness in Remedy

Incentivized

I tried to use WordPress with some success. Also looked at Joomla. But when I saw OutSystems I knew I had been wasting my time there. It takes you longer to get going with OutSystems - but even I as a novice realized immediately that Outsystems is simply in another league. Outsystems is powerful. (Can you compare WordPress and Joomla to Outsystems - I don't think so).

unclear. lot of for less

Incentivized

Again, always room for improvement, but a very stable product none-the-less.

Incentivized

• Positive: an introduction to ITIL and viewing Asset, User Management from the perspective of ITIL, and how BMC has implemented those processes
• Negative: The development team needs to communicate better with the sales and support side, and they need offer an open API
• Negative: Currently the Asset Management side has little security and validation of Asset input: anyone can make API (mostly), at any item, which is a problem that I am apart of solving.
• The UX needs updating, badly. Its quality is poor: it functions, but it is cumbersome, click-heavy and requires several hours to understand how to function with it. Also, it needs to ditch IE11 support, altogether.

Incentivized

• The ease of use of the OutSystems development process has been the biggest ROI for us. We have developed our Framework product and maintained/enhanced it with only 4 workers.
• OutSystems has enhanced their product very significantly over the last 4 years. They have gone from a simple to use tool to a very simple to use sophisticated tool that covers the standard mainframe-based computing apps and the apps used on handheld mobile devices all using the same basic set of development tools.

Incentivized