Discussion successfully moved from  Products to Remedy OnDemand 

Hello Don,

Our Organizational setup is fairly similar
and we recently upgraded from 8.1 to 9.1. I would say this was the
simplest and painless upgrade. We are using remedy for the past 10 years
from version 6. The best part of this upgrade - it’s from cloud to cloud. So
the impact and realignments were very little. There were no manual interventions
required to move our complete foundation data from 8.1 to 9.1. During the
validation period, you need to test really well and ensure that the customizations
are not broken.

We received a clear cut project planner from
BMC and the details were well documented. They were able to meet the timelines
at almost all phases. We had 45 days change period. During this window were
allowed perform any user administration activities. However, we were not
supposed to create any new SLA’s, SRM forms, customizations… Guess that should
be manageable.

Special mention: The 9.1 upgrade team was knowledgeable
and they were quick to fix any issues we reported during validation. Before we
went live with 9.1 they resolved all the major issues we reported.

Overall I would recommend the 9.1 upgrade!

Thanks for sharing your experiences. We really want our customers to network and help each other to get best possible value from their OnDemand subscriptions.

Best Regards

Karl-Anders Falk

BMC Remedy OnDemand Business Relationship Manager

Arthur D'Souza

Hi Don,

We use Remdy on Demand now for serveral years and have been upgrade from Remedy 7.6.04 to Remedy V9.0 over de last months. It was a veru smooth processes with no hick-ups or strange surprises. it took around 12 weeks, where we were guide by BMC Profession Services (Michiel Heijmans ...thanks!!) to determine which customizations can be replaced by OOTB funtionality and the small issues which were found during UAT where fix rappidly by support of the great team of BMC in India. So overall perfect and smooth transition.

Henri WIjnen

DSM ITIL Process Manager

Henri,

many thanks to you as well for collaborating and sharing experiences.

Best Regards

/KAF

Hi Henri,

It was a pleasure to work with you and the rest of the DSM team. This RoD upgrade was a smooth ride compared to previous upgrades. The RoD upgrade team has done an excellent job. Even the  BMC professional services team was impressed by the RoD upgrade team upgrade skills. They master the art of Remedy ITSM upgrades.

Important to mention is that DSM's RoD v9 upgrade process followed strict GxP process requirements. The upgraded v9 RoD system was classified as a validated system. 

Looking forward to continue the good and close collaboration with DSM and your team.

Michiel

Hi Michiel,

Thank you very much for your feedback. It is particularly good to hear that the upgrade followed and at all times complied with strict GXP requirements.

I’m sure that this feedback will be especially reassuring to BMC’s Pharma customers.

Kind Regards

Matt Fitzgerald

BMC Remedy OnDemand Business Relationship Manager

Hi Don, We are a similar sized business and migrated from 8.1 to 9.1, we have two separate instances and have so far upgraded one system and in the process of upgrading the other for the second time after having to pull the upgrade the first time around!!

I believe that for the most part the upgrade went well in most areas... However, I work in the Service Asset and Configuration Management team and therefore my focus is with Asset Console and Atrium CMDB. We had a large number of issues throughout the 9.1 upgrade. It seemed to affect all parts of Asset & CMDB. Some basic functionality problems, issues with customisations, issues with integrations, UDM configuration, reconciliation and data loads. There were many things that OOTB were working fine in V8 that seemed to just not work in V9! We also experienced consistency issues, having to test, re-test, fix and re-fix previously resolved issues as we moved through Dev>Pre-Prod>Prod phases.

We had approximately a 6 week change freeze which again only seemed to cause issues with Asset/CMDB due to the system automatically hard deleting Asset People Relationships - but BMC advising that nothing can be deleted.

We also had issues with the Delta Data Migration tool missing large amounts of asset data, and going live in our V9 production system with incomplete/corrupt asset data.

I'm interested to know if the customers who had a "painless" experience utilise the Asset and CMDB functionality within Remedy?

The upgrade team were very good and worked very hard to resolve most of the issues, but in terms of Asset, CMDB, Atrium etc. it just seemed that the system was against them at every turn! My feedback would be that if you don't use Asset Management/CMDB/Integrations etc. you'll probably be OK. If you do, take it nice and slow, test everything, test it again, test it again and hope it sticks when you cut over to Production

Hi Don, no problem at all.

The issues with DDM are as yet unconfirmed, but the upgrade team have put some additional checks in place as well as some remediation actions in case the issue occurs again. The bulk of the issue came from a number of AST forms not being copied across, so we had records in CMDB forms only meaning that assets were not visible through asset console, and did not turn up in searches from Incident/Change. Fortunately an excellent BMC resource managed to identify the missing records and re-import them which resolved a large portion of the issues relatively quickly, however, confidence had been lost, and we had to do an attribute level verification process to check V8 vs V9 asset attributes, identify the differences and then manually check these CIs to ensure they contained the correct (most recent) updates. This took almost a week!

In my opinion, I think that BMC need to fully re-vamp their DDM tool to make it more robust and to cater for Relationships better.

Another thing to check would be reconciliation, we had problems with this for quite a while. Manual (sandbox) updates/creation taking 5-10 mins to actually appear in the BMC.ASSET dataset. The upgrade team worked with CE on this and have now resolved it, so hopefully whatever was wrong will be applied to other customers systems during the upgrade.

Hi  Tom,

Firstly I would like to thank you for your open and candid feedback regarding the recent Remedy upgrade. We will take this and review it internally with our senior On Demand management team to see where we can improve the upgrade process.

Whilst EDF suffered a challenging upgrade in certain areas, I just wanted to be clear this is an isolated experience. Even so, we will work hard to continue improving the upgrade process with your valuable feedback.

Having worked with you on this project I share your views and was also happy to see you recognise the hard work and support from BMC. We have made our senior executives aware of the fantastic support the upgrade team provided and we will ensure they get recognition for this.