BMC partners are committed to excellence, growth, and providing an exceptional customer experience. The BMC Partner Advantage program highlights and celebrates the achievements of our partner community at the end of each BMC fiscal year by recognizing partner award winners in several categories across all regions:
Partner of the Year by Region
Partner of the Year by Region by ESO Product Pillar
Awards Guidelines
Award winners have an impressive record of year-on-year sales growth, further enhanced by new business activity, and have a high volume of incremental opportunity registrations. Also considered is the commitment to BMC product knowledge through the achievement of technical certifications. Partner results from April 1, 2019 through March 31, 2020 are used to determine the awards recognition. Eligibility is limited to BMC Platinum or Gold partner tiers. Refer to the specific eligibility requirements for each BMC Partner of the Year Award category.
Awards Presentation
Partner award winners are announced annually in Q1 of the BMC fiscal year. BMC partner awards recognize excellence, and we look forward to celebrating the superior results and achievements of our partner award winners.
BMC Helix 19.08 includes new functionality that continues to drive a superior experience for the enterprise across end users, agents, IT Operations and developers. Here’s a summary of the new capabilities rolled out in 19.08.
BMC Helix Discovery
The 19.08 release of Technology Knowledge Updates (TKU) focuses on the resurgence of cloud discovery. Recent TKUs include 15 additional AWS services and five Azure resources.
BMC Helix ITSM
The 19.08 release of BMC Helix ITSM features significant advances across core ITSM functions, multi-cloud and cognitive capabilities that will continue to deliver industry-leading service management to our customers.
CORE ITSM
New, At-A-Glance Calendar: Comprehensive overview of the change and release tickets, business events, and outages.
Self Help and Guided Tours: Learn how to use BMC Helix ITSM and navigate all its features with guided assistance. Agents can access self help throughout the BMC Helix ITSM UI and get specific multimedia help and/or guidance to help them use the solution to its fullest.
Advanced Smart Reporting: Real-time synchronization of users and automatic sharing of common content across multiple tenants.
Enhanced CMDB: New class manager and UX framework enabling better efficiencies along with improved explorer integrations into BMC Helix Discovery.
PostgreSQL Support: Supports PostgreSQL 10 database (including Amazon Aurora) to provide a lower TCO for database option for customers.
MULTI-CLOUD & DEVOPS
New and Extended DevOps Service Management: Increased seamless integration enhancements into BMC Helix ITSM with leading Agile software tools:
Jira: Updated incident status, share attachments with and map custom fields (including Jira Service Desk).
Azure DevOps: Share activity notes and map custom fields.
Live Chat Workspace: For improved service, agents and users can quickly and collaboratively work to resolve issues as well as create incidents/work orders directly from the chat.
New Multi-Cloud Provider Management: Create incidents based on Azure Alerts and integration into Azure.
COGNITIVE
Machine Learning for Change Risk Recommendation and Problem Root Cause Analysis: Change requests can automatically be assigned a risk level recommendation and problem root cause analysis gets automatic recommendations – all based on machine learning algorithms.
Intelligent Swarming with Microsoft Teams: ChatOps-type collaboration along with natural language, cognitive assistance to help with more efficient and quicker resolutions to incidents and tickets.
BMC Helix Chatbot
BMC Helix Chatbot 19.08 focuses on both the end-user experience and the organization’s ability to measure and improve the capabilities of the chatbot.
Digital Workplace Advanced ‘My Stuff’ now in BMC Helix Chatbot: From a chat conversation in BMC Helix Chatbot, end users can now access their assets or MyStuff information in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced.
Cognitive Routing to Live Agent: Based on the conversation, BMCHelix Chatbotwill route chats to the right subject matter expert agents who can quickly and effectively resolve the user queries.
Cognitive Summarization: When an end user is transferred fromBMC Helix Chatbotto a live agent, a summary of the chatbot and end user conversation is provided to the agent.
Chatbot Clarifications: BMC Helix Chatbotautomaticallyasksthe end-userclarifying questionsand uses this informationto provide more accurate responses.
BMC Helix Digital Workplace
BMC Helix Digital Workplace 19.08 delivers significant new functionalities that customers have requested, including enhancements to MSPs, end user experience, and catalog capabilities.
Service Provider Mode to Manage Multiple Customers: Managed Service Providers (MSPs)can now add and manage additional customersas well as credits.
More User Control for Viewing Events in BMC Helix Digital Workplace: Userscan now filterevents in theBMC HelixDigital Workplace by Requests, Approvals, and Appointments. Users can also adjust page size to allow for a more helpful page layout.
Expanded Question Designer Options: Question designer enhancements allow for greater levels of detail and added flexibility when capturing information via questionnaires.
Ability to Set the Default Language to Set Language Preferences: BMC Helix Digital Workplace now allows for a default languageto be set byadministrators, while still providing end users the ability to override the defaultsettingand select alanguage of their choice.
BMC Helix Business Workflows
BMC Helix Business Workflows 19.08 delivers significant new functionalities including email-based approvals, Adobe e-Signature, bulk case assignment, and more.
Email-Based Approvals: Approval decisions can now be executed via email.
Bulk Assignment of Cases: Case agents can change the assignment of cases for multiple cases at once.
Templatized Activity Notes: Agents can use predefined templates when adding notes to cases, tasks, persons or knowledge articles.
Filters for Activity Stream: Content of the activity stream for Cases, Tasks, Knowledge articles and Work History can be filtered by type of notes.
Watchlist: Case agents can watch and get notified about assignment and status changes for cases in which they have access.
Enhanced Case History Tracking: Case History now tracks modifications to tasks and logs who viewed a case; reports now include the activity stream and dynamic case fields.
Agent Work History: The work history lists all activities of an agent in the person profile.
Global Search: Search capability to search across cases, tasks, knowledge articles, documents, people, case templates and task templates.
Service Targets Support Business Time Segments: Business time segments that define work hours and unavailability are considered during service target computations.
Reopen Closed Cases: Case agents can re-open closed cases; case business analysts can define how many days after a case was closed this is allowed.
Configurable Types of Relationships for Cases and Persons: Agents can specify the type of a relationship when adding related cases or persons to a case; case business analysts can configure available types.
Configurable Case Source: Agents using Quick Case or Create Case can select a source of the case (e.g. phone or walk-by); Case Business Analysts can configure the options available to agents.
Process Actions to Change an Assignment or the Case Status: Automated tasks can change the assignment or status of a cases.
Support for E-sign Processes in Adobe Sign: Adobe Sign can be leveraged into collect e-signatures.
BMC Helix Platform
The BMC Helix Platform 19.08 release continues advances in app development, cognitive and enhancing/extending/customizing capabilities.
APP DEVELOPMENT
Content Package template: Customize an application and create a Content Package which serves as a template when applied to a bundle.
Actionable notifications: Add an action to a notification alert (i.e. bell icon in the UI, email) and can attach an action to the button.
COGNITIVE
BMC Native (Google) classification: Enables choice of Google as provider for choosing auto-categorization and auto-assignment for your app.
Insight Engine enhancements: Leverage cognitive search as an alternative to Full Text Search (FTS) to allow filtered searches by confidence threshold and highly rated sources (like crowd sourced knowledge articles).
ENHANCE
Extractive summaries of chatbot – end-user conversations: Integrated summaries (or transcripts) can be provided to the agent to accelerate resolution of an issue.
BMC Helix Cloud Security
BMC Helix Cloud Security is now part of the BMC Helix Suite. Cloud Ops teams can discover cloud resources with BMC Helix Discovery, run CIS, PCI or GDPR compliance policies on the discovered public cloud resources and auto-remediate the compliance violations through change requests using BMC Helix ITSM.
BMC Helix Cloud Cost
With this release, BMC Helix Cloud Cost is now part of the BMC Helix suite. Cloud Ops teams can now proactively manage and optimize their public cloud spend and costs. They can discover cloud assets using BMC Helix Discovery, get visibility into the cost of these resources, and proactively optimize the cost using out-of-box recommendations and automations.
Resources
To support the BMC Helix 19.08 announcement, we have updated the following content:
Please check out the robust resources available in the links above to enable customer success with BMC Helix. Also, be sure to follow and engage with us on social to stay current on BMC Helix and help us get the word out to even more customers:
Are you getting optimum value out of the new BMC Helix solutions? BMC Helix delivers cognitive service management that is fast, accurate, and cost effective and is available to run on the customer’s choice of cloud, hybrid cloud, or customer's own data center.
See BMC's newest dedicated Helix resources including PG kits, analyst reports, enablement, and many other resources at https://helix.bmc.com. Whether you are a customer, partner, or BMC employee, Helix content is tailored specifically for your role—and is located all in one place.
Make sure your customers and prospects don't miss BMC Helix Immersion Days 2019 where they will discover how Cognitive Service Management is imperative for their digital transformation. At Immersion Days, they’ll gain a clear understanding of key service management trends and shared experiences from the industry professionals who have been there. Please spread the news about this unique event in the heart of Silicon Valley and encourage your customers and prospects to register soon to take advantage of our early bird rates.
WHY ATTEND?
At this three-day immersive experience on the future of service management your customers and prospects will:
Find out what’s new in the BMC Helix Suite of Solutions
Dive into practical, hands-on solutions labs
Discover best practices for today’s modern and evolving service management industry
Meet with experts and peers and hear case studies, tips and tricks for digital transformation success
Network and unwind at our reception and party
EARLY-BIRD RATES
Make sure to register and get rooms by these important dates to take advantage of special rates.
August 26, 2019:
To take advantage of our negotiated group hotel rates of $359 at the Santa Clara Marriott, book rooms by August 26, available while supplies last. Standard rates are as much as $800+, so please book early.
Attendees at BMC Helix Immersion Days 2019 that are following us on Twitter and LinkedIn will have an opportunity to win prizes by engaging with our posts about the event prior to attending and live Tweeting during the event. Help us get a head start in creating a buzz about BMC Helix Immersion Days 2019 by following and sharing.
To be entered to win, simply post on LinkedIn and/or TwitterWhy you are coming to BMC Helix Immersion Days and be sure to include the hashtag #BMCHelixImmersionDays. The best posts will be read and winners will be announced at the Wednesday night event!
Share on Twitter:
Follow us and tag us in your tweets at @BMCHelix on Twitter
BMC Helix 19.05 includes new functionality that continues to drive a superior experience for the enterprise across end users, agents, IT Operations and developers. Here’s a summary of the new capabilities rolled out in 19.05.
BMC customers and partners can learn what is new for this release:
BMC Helix Chatbot
BMC Helix Chatbot 19.05 focuses on both the end-user experience and the organization’s ability to measure and improve the capabilities of the chatbot.
Support for New Channels: Users can now access BMC Helix Chatbot through two additional messaging platforms: MS Teams and Skype for Business on-premises.
New End-User Web User Interface:New contemporary chat and messaging experience for end users across all devices.
End-User Surveys and FeedbackBMC Helix Chatbot now has out-of-the-box surveys that are presented to the users at the right times in a conversation. IT can use this feedback to help improve the end-user experience with BMC Helix.
Smart Reporting for Helix ChatbotUsing Smart Reporting, IT can report against data in the telemetry service using out-of-the box or custom reports.
Cognitive Insights for BMC Helix Chatbot: BMC Helix Chatbots can now provide knowledge to users through cognitive insights, leveraging the enterprise Insight Engine. Chatbots can consume this information to provide more useful results.
BMC Helix Digital Workplace
BMC Helix Digital Workplace 19.05 streamlines workflows for end users and agents while improving governance capabilities for IT operations, enabling security and compliance.
BMC Digital Workplace Catalog:BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog now includes Multi-CompanyMode to manage multiple customers and multiple organizations.
Credit Management:Now you can assign credit limits to customers for Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
Integrated Self-Help: Offers guided assistance to help users learn to navigate the digital workplace and provides links to helpful topics and how-to videos.
Service Request Status Tracker: This feature allows employees to easily visualize and track the current status of their requests.
End-user Privacy Notice for Cookies: With new EMEA privacy laws in place, BMC Helix Digital Workplace enables compliance for data collection.
Data Restrictions:This enhancement allows greater control over the catalog at the service-request level.
BMC Helix ITSM
BMC Helix ITSM 19.05 brings advancements for DevOps, providing seamless cognitive service management across multi-cloud services, providers, and environments.
Integration of Azure DevOps Services:Provides single-pane-of-glass collaboration and management of Azure DevOps work items and BMC Helix ITSM incidents.
DevOps-Driven Change Management:New risk analysis module calculates the risk level of every brokered change from leading agile development tools such as Jira, enabling flexibility for auto-approvals. Organizations can deliver rapid changes without downtime or outages.
BMC Helix Business Workflows
BMC Helix Business Workflows 19.05 streamlines service management for lines of business.
Conditional Task Flows:New conditional branching for workflows has been part of BMC Helix Business Workflows for a while, but this enhanced version has improved guidance and visibility into tasks.
Confidential Dynamic Fields:With this release, personal data will only be displayed to agents who have proper permissions.
Dynamic Case Assignment:Now cases can be assigned to support groups and agents dynamically, depending on location or via round-robin scheduling. Get even more functionality for fair and shared case assignment, optimizing cases among the group to make sure work is evenly distributed.
Email Attachments:You can now send emails with attached files.
Tier 4 Categories:New Tier 4 categories provides a new level to help you organize your categories.
BMC Helix Platform
With 19.05, BMC Helix Platform enables new cognitive UI and other enhanced functionality to bolster the overall BMC Helix solution and gives developers powerful capabilities to enhance, extend, and customize their apps.
Cognitive Usage Dashboard:Through IBM Watson Assistant, administrators can get details on usage metrics for both auto-classification, auto-assignment, and chatbot applications.
Cognitive Search in Custom Apps:By using natural language query, custom applications can allow cognitive search capabilities across the BMC Helix Platform data and external data file systems and databases.
Embedded Process Designer in App View:Developers and business analysts can launch the process designer directly in the created application to create, modify, and manage processes and workflows without having to leave the app.
Resources
To support the BMC Helix 19.05 announcement, we have updated the following content:
Please check out the robust resources available in the links above to enable customer success with BMC Helix. Partners, be sure to follow and engage with us on social to stay current on BMC Helix and help us get the word out to even more customers:
The BMC Helix leads the market in cognitive automation and service management. With BMC Helix, you can offer your customers a suite of solutions that empower businesses to proactively and predictively discover, service, and deliver omni-channel experiences that are fast, accurate, cost effective and available to run on your choice of cloud or in a hybrid model.
BMC Helix Marketing is busy developing new content, events and social promotions to drive awareness and help you win new customers.
Social
Stay connected to BMC Helix through the following channels. Be sure to follow and connect as we will have a contest very soon to showcase the most social partner:
We have exciting new content on BMC Helix to drive brand awareness and thought leadership. Be sure to read and share with your prospects and customers.
Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) of BMC Helix:
Service Reimagined Webinar and CrowdChat: Be sure to listen in and invite your prospects and customers to this informative and unique online experience. Register here
WWW.BMCHelix.Cio.Com: BMC Helix has a special microsite on Microsite Cio magazine dedicated to BMC Helix and thought leadership around Digital Transformation. Read the content here and share with your customers and prospects to help them successfully manage a multi-cloud, multi-device, multi-channel world.
Events
BMC Helix is hosting several user groups. Attend one in your area—and send your customers too.
Want to provide input on new developments before release? We are looking for partners and customers to be a part of our BMC Helix Client Management 12.9 beta. We plan to kick off the program the week of May 20,and the program will run until the last week of June.
Some areas that we plan to include in the beta program are:
recording remote control sessions
enhancements to the web console
patch management
operational rules
We are looking for participants who can:
attend beta review calls
test new features
be active in our Communities group (ask questions, provide input, post issues)
complete the beta survey
Ready to sign up? Follow the below instructions, and we look forward to your participation.
How to Sign Up
Log into Communities to ensure your company name and your individual company email address (ie: john@company_name.com) are in your profile.
This annual guide identifies the strongest and most successful partner programs in the channel today, offered by the top technology suppliers for IT products and services. The 5-Star rating recognizes an elite subset of companies that offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs.
To determine the 2019 5-Star ratings, The Channel Company’s research team assessed each supplier’s partner program based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support, and communication.
Some of the programs the BMC Partner Advantage Program employs to support its resellers include, but are not limited to:
Automated systems, online tools, and partner portal
Awards for innovation and sales
Training and certification programs
Sales enablement
Discounts, promotions, rebates, and rewards
Field and inside channel account manager coverage
MDF, joint marketing planning, and marketing resources
Low-interest financing, direct deposit, and price protections
Loyalty programs
Partner communications
Product demo program
Leads and referrals
“With new technologies emerging every year, evaluating which IT vendors to partner with grows increasingly more complex for solution providers,” said Bob Skelley, CEO, The Channel Company. “We are proud the CRN Partner Program Guide has become the trusted resource to identify the most rewarding partner programs and provides crucial insight into their strengths and benefits for the channel.”
Architecture Compatibility Modeler (ACM) is an online tool available to anyone, allowing you to quickly find compatibility information about BMC products with other BMC products, as well as underlying technology requirements of those BMC products (operating systems, databases, and other requirements). You can find ACM at https://docs.bmc.com/docs/modeler.
ACM helps BMC customers and partners build a high-level model of the current environment in an easy-to-understand, visual format and provides a simple way to see the impact of changes to the model. You can save and share product offerings based on your or your customer’s current and target environment needs. ACM is a great new way to model environments that support your future plans with BMC solutions.
BMC DSM Support team has lots of new self-solve resources available 24 hours a day to help our partners and mutual customers not only solve their problems faster, but also to receive proactive product support information.
Please visit this site to view all the different resources available: Self-Solve resources
One of the links is for the new Remedy and Discovery YouTube channel. This has lots of great videos on how to resolve problems, demonstrate new functionality and also recordings from our very successful Connect with Remedy Webinar series. Subscribing to this channel means you’ll be alerted to all new uploads, so you won’t miss a thing!
There is now also a new monthly Support Newsletter called “Hot Off the Press” which provides links to the latest patches and hotfixes, product news, training, and other helpful information. Here’s a link to the March edition: Hot Off The Press: March 2019
As BMC partners, let us help you stay armed with the most current, up-to-date product support news and proactive information by subscribing to our Remedy and Discovery YouTube channel and follow our Hot off the Press newsletter, so you can proactively receive it on a monthly basis.
The BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management (CSM) solution enables customers to digitally transform their business by delivering true predictive service management
CSM is the future of service management. It embeds emerging technologies like AI and machine learning into every step of the service delivery lifecycle to increase productivity, accuracy, and speed while reducing costs. CSM replaces outdated, manual processes with intelligence and automation to deliver smart, omni-channel experiences to both agents and end users and automate L0 and L1 service desk functions.
BMC Helix, which is architected through microservices with containers, can be deployed in your customer's public cloud of choice. By using containers as the deployment mechanism, BMC Helix helps IT deliver the speed, agility, and flexibility required to respond to the needs of digital transformation. BMC Helix containers eliminate deployment issues while adding critical multi-cloud management, so your customers gain agility and speed as well as efficiency and cost-savings.
Learn more about becoming a BMC partner and leveraging the power of BMC Helix to transform customers from reactive ITSM to proactive, predictive, and cognitive service management.
Congratulations are in order once again to Vice President of Global Ecosystem Sales Sanjay Gupta for being honored as a CRN Channel Chief. The 2019 recognition marks the third consecutive year that Sanjay has been named a top IT channel leader by CRN.
Each of the 2019 Channel Chiefs has demonstrated exceptional leadership, vision, and commitment to their channel partner programs. Channel Chief honorees are selected by CRN’s editorial staff as a result of their professional achievements, standing in the industry, dedication to the channel partner community, and strategies for driving future growth and innovation.
Sanjay's recognition is due in large part to his dedication to partner presales enablement and certification and the exponential growth he has overseen in the partner program. When discussing the success of the BMC partner program, Sanjay cites BMC industry-leading programs that help partners embrace the shift to the cloud and move to the modern offerings that customers demand.
Learn more about this and other awards in the BMC Partner Advantage program:
BMC is inviting you to participate in the development one of ZSolution’s most exciting products in recent years. You’ll have an opportunity to engage directly with BMC product experts, product management, and R&D to help validate and provide feedback on the capabilities of the initial release of AMI Predictive.
AMI Predictive is a machine learning powered solution to predict and notify of potentially crippling events before they happen. The AMI Predictive validation program is open to all BMC customers and partners.
BMC AMI solutions span the entire ZSolutions’ portfolio including Security, DevOps, Capacity and Cost Management, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Operations. The initial focus of the Friends of AMI community will be on AI Ops solutions and expand to the other products in the future.
The first validation program will be for AMI Predictive. AMI predictive will provide these initial capabilities:
Domain expertise-built machine learning models based on decades of experience
System health insights based on multi-variant correlation
Out-of-the-box detection of dozens of potentially catastrophic system events
Participation includes the following:
Contribute your operational metrics to help validate the models.
Participate in periodic sprint reviews where developers demonstrate designs, mockups, and working code in return for your feedback.
Participate in facilitated product validation: log into one of our sandbox environments and provide feedback.
Accept pre-release code into your test environment, and provide critical hands-on feedback.
Collaborate with BMC and other partner and customer participants to provide open feedback.
Be a willing Customer Connect Reference upon successfully completing the program.
Feeling vulnerable is uncomfortable because it means you are open to risk. We can feel this way when we have neglected to take proper measures to keep ourselves safe. CIOs who don’t address security issues seldom rest easy.
The upside to being vulnerable is that you are being honest about the situation you are facing rather than living in denial. Denying a dangerous situation puts us more at risk, but directly addressing the danger means that we, as individuals or organizations, regardless of the short-term discomfort, have a better chance to mitigate the danger and secure our safety.
As our dependence on technology grows exponentially so do the associated risks and tools that help us automate and manage the tasks we need to do to protect ourselves.
Comprehensive plans yield big benefits
CIOs recognize the importance of a comprehensive security plan. IDG reports that the cybersecurity industry is seeing one of the biggest increases in spending by organizations this year.
"In 2019, 72% of tech executives expect their spending on cybersecurity to increase, while 25% report it will remain the same. Currently, 63% of organizations have cybersecurity solutions in use – 17% of which are upgrading/ refining their solutions. Of the businesses that don’t have cybersecurity solutions in place, 36% are either researching or piloting their solutions." -A Guide to the CIO’s 2019 Tech Priorities, IDG
Comprehensive security plans include vulnerability assessments and mediation plans. Unfortunately, these tasks are not once and done operations. Accessing vulnerabilities and addressing them requires constant attention. It is like putting in work to maintain a relationship or staying fit and healthy. The upfront cost and proactive work yields big dividends. Vulnerability assessment should be an integral part of your IT operations.
The cost of data breaches
Data breaches can be devastating. They are often high profile with monetary losses being just the beginning. Theft of confidential data can end careers and deeply damage an organizations brand. According to statistics published by the UK Government, over 40 percent of organizations suffered a security breach of some kind last year – slightly less than a coin toss and other surveys suggest the odds are worse than that.
However, Gartner studies maintain that 99 percent of the vulnerabilities exploited by the end of 2020 will continue to be ones known by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident.
How BMC and BMC partners can help
BMC partners can help you leverage BMC solutions to better identify your security and compliance issues, adding business insight, prioritizing action and then automating the remediation to reduce risk if you’re feeling a little vulnerable, now is the time to take action. Learn more about BMC Vulnerability Management today.
