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BMC Software, whose specialized software helps enterprises organize their tech-support functions, on June 5 launched a new service-management package that uses cognitive computing to speed tasks along.
BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management integrates analytics IT, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, into traditional IT service management, thus optimizing every layer of service delivery for end-users, agents and developers.
With Helix, BMC claims to be the first to bring end-to-end cognitive service management across every cloud to the enterprise, enabling enterprises to upgrade their service management from reactive to proactive and predictive with a high level of accuracy and speed. After all, speed is what IT is all about.
Long Time in Development
“We’ve been working on Helix for three to four years, and it’s different (from what’s already in the market) in several unique and material new ways,” Bill Berutti, BMC’s President of Cloud and Enterprise, told eWEEK. “The first is deployment architecture, and it’s important because customers care about it.
“Everybody’s got a proprietary private cloud for SaaS deployments—we have one, ServiceNow has one, and so on—but customers don’t always want it. Sometimes they want to consume it in AWS, in Azure in Google Cloud. Maybe they have a big commitment to those platforms, and they see cost advantage.
“Traditionally, our solution and those of our competitors weren’t easily portable in a true, multi-tenant SaaS nature. So Helix uses as its underpinnings containerization from Docker and Kubernetes, so that we can create instances in any cloud environment and allow our customers to stand up a SaaS-delivered solution from any cloud environment they choose.”
AWS Available Now, Azure, Google to Come
AWS deployments became available this week, with Azure and Google soon to come, Berutti said. “This is a big deal because we’re going to get performance and cost and cloud-choice leverage for our customers by that decision,” he said.
Breaking this down into further detail, BMC Helix CSM features three key attributes:
- Cloud: Delivers everything as-a-service (Remedy-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service, Data Warehouse Platform-as-a-Service, and Business Workflows-as-a-Service).
- Containers: Runs on enterprise’s choice of multi-cloud (BMC, Azure, AWS, etc).
- Cognitive: Helps enterprises change from ITSM to Cognitive Service Management with artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots and virtual agents.
BMC Helix, which builds upon the CSM approach recently introduced on BMC Innovation Suite, is built on containerized, microservices-based architecture, enabling customers to run on their choice of cloud with cognitive capabilities. The BMC offering includes:
- Helix Remedy: Delivers predictive service management through auto-classification, assignment and routing of incidents; embedded multi-cloud capabilities to broker incidents, changes, and releases across cloud providers;
- Helix Business Workflows: Helps extend beyond IT to lines of business, such as HR, facilities and procurement;
- Helix Digital Workplace: Provides omni-channel conversational experiences for end users beyond web to Slackbot, Chatbot, SMS and Skype, allowing technology issues to be addressed proactively in a user-friendly manner;
- Helix Discovery: Available this fall, this helps businesses discover assets and services across on-premise and multi-cloud environments including AWS, Azure, Open Stack and Cloud Foundry; and
- Helix Innovation Suite: Cloud-native microservices-based platform that helps companies extend, customize and integrate through REST APIs.
BMC Helix CSM is available now through its channel partners. For more information, go here.
In other BMC news, Investment firm KKR confirmed last week that it would buy the company from owners that include Bain Capital and Golden Gate Capital.
The Houston-based company was taken private for $6.9 billion in 2013 by a group led by Bain and Golden Gate, after pressure from activist hedge fund Elliott Management Corp.
The New York Post reported that BMC could be worth around $10 billion.