Remedy readying update to IT Service Management

BMC’s acquisition of Remedy is starting to bear fruit, as Remedy next week releases IT Service Management Version 5.5.

ITSM 5.5 has more features in its Asset Management, Service Level Agreement (SLA), Help Desk and Change Management products. Plus, Remedy is adding workflow among these applications.

In Asset Management, Remedy is adding features to better manage asset lifecycles. The software tracks approvals, receiving and returns; provides access to the Configuration Catalog; and enhances purchase requisitions and purchase orders. New configuration features focus on desktop license compliance, scheduled preventive maintenance, bulk updates of asset records, and the Configuration Catalog. The software also will track how many times an asset went down and will keep an outage log.

From a contractual standpoint, the added features in Asset Management are focused on leases. An End of Lease change request template is provided to initiate the EOL process. ITSM 5.5 can handle three levels of parent-child contractual relationships, and it relates assets to contracts through a multiple-select feature. Remedy offers Rapid Results Packages that are a quick way to implement the applications.

The financial side of Asset Management includes a Cost Management Framework to calculate total cost of ownership. Users can set up cost centers, and the software has the capability to divide costs between two cost centers. Asset Management also performs cost-based charge-backs. Plus, Remedy has added depreciation enhancements and multiple-currency support.

Remedy’s SLA product has been totally rewritten in Version 5.5, with a more scalable and reliable architecture, the company says.

SLAs in the Remedy context relate to the service that is delivered by the help desk. For example, SLA 5.5 measures how quickly the help desk responds to user inquiries. This release focuses on the business end user, and it sports a new user interface, including role-based and Web interfaces. It also tracks SLA status through its lifecycle, from the SLA draft through expiration. SLA 5.5 provides milestones to look for and automatically initiates actions once certain criteria are met.

SLA 5.5 uses Web services to allow for easier integration with external applications. It also works with other Remedy applications, as well as any AR System application. It provides Flashboards for monitoring SLAs, Change Management, Help Desk, and Asset Management. Version 5.5 also incorporates ITIL concepts for service management.

Remedy’s Help Desk 5.5 integrates problem management. It focuses on the business service by providing the capability to categorize service requests by the type of service. It also allows asset records to be related to an incident, which could be valuable for diagnosing problems.

Change Management 5.5 is integrated with Asset Management to provide out-of-the-box automated change order creation for purchase requests, maintenance, and end-of-lease changes.

ITSM 5.5 is the first release for Remedy since becoming part of BMC. It’s good to see Remedy making progress once again.