Remedies for Remedy

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Archive for the ‘Misc’ category

Service Catalog – What is it, why we need it, and how to build one.

October 13th, 2009

Service catalog is one of the buzz word you hear a lot, organizations want to build a proper service catalog that serves the basic needs of its employees or customers in a simple fashion where one can browse through the services offered by the company.

To get a simple idea about Service catalog and what is it all about, watch this 2 min video

Service Catalog -

“A service catalog (or catalogue), as defined in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Service Delivery, is a list of services that an organization provides, often to its employees or customer“.

Typically any service catalog contains:

A brief description of service offered
Procedure to utilize the service
Costs related to the service
Time required to fulfill the request (SLA)
Who can avail the service

Another video from CSU class which explains the need for a service catalog based on ITIL v3 Service Design volume.

Services can be of different types Business Service- a high level or high priority services provided to fulfill the business needs, Technical Services, and Service Requests for employees or customers.

Mastering BSM: Building a Service Catalog by BMC Software

This video will walk you through how BMC built its internal Service Catalog. It is intended for IT Professionals who are either starting or in the process of building a service catalog.

Chris Flynn, Service Level Manager, BMC Software explains how they built a service catalog for internal purpose. Its a short video explaining how a service catalog should be built and what important steps need to be taken care of. I liked the part where he suggests to celebrate and take a break after building a catalog

A simple Service Catalog example from Service Engine:

service_catalog_Service Desk

Most important is KISS – Keep it simple stupid!

Yes, make it simple for end users who dont need to understand the technical details or doesn’t care about what OS or underlying database.

Make simple catalog just like a restaurant menu in plain english and short description about the service, and try to get them in to categories for easy access and understanding.

Couple of interesting reads about Service Catalog:

Share your experiences in building a service catalog here….

Namaste

Venkat

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Posted in SRM, Videos

Tags: bmc BMC Remedy BSM ITIL ITSM Service Catalog SRM

Timeline(History) of BMC Action Request System Remedy

October 12th, 2009

Original Remedy Corp logo

BMC Remedy Logo

Peregrine_Logo

I have seen many people asking about release dates of a particular version and whats so new in it and most of the time we will be able to answer those questions easily, but very few people know what really happened with ARSystem in the early days, how it started and how it evolved in to what it is today.

For all the people that wonder how it started and where it started, the answer is- No, it haven’t started in a basement or garage and its not a pet project either (Not sure how Doug will react to this). Remedy Corp was incorporated on November 20, 1990 in Delware. Larry Garlick Founder & CEO of the company and well-known Doug Muller is the Chief Architect behind our beloved Remedy platform.

The first version is released somewhere in 1992 and version 2.0 in 1993 before it was sold to Peregrine Inc in 2001. Peregrine continued the good work started by Remedy Corp and released 3.0 in 1996 and version 4.0 in 1999 and version 5.0 in 2001. There is only one release under Peregrine which is 4.5.2 a maintenance release and no major releases.

The major switch change came in 2002, when BMC bought Remedy assets from Peregrine Inc for an astonishing $355 million and operational liabilities. “The combination of Remedy’s industry-leading service management and problem resolution capabilities, paired with BMC Software’s performance and availability management solutions will provide customers with powerful, integrated service management solutions,” said Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO, BMC Software. “Remedy’s products will extend BMC’s core market-leading data and systems management solutions to deliver the most comprehensive and integrated business service management solutions.”

From then BMC has released popular versions 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 7.1 and latest 7.5.0 in Jan 2009. BMC has developed great products and solutions based up on Remedy platform, the latest ITSM suite is the best example of how robust and complex applications can be developed with Remedy. Some even say BMC is the est thing ever happened to ARS and BMC is the only reason why still Remedy is around.

Please refresh your browser if timeline doesn’t show up, if it still doesn’t work click the pop-out and it opens up in new tab. (Used Google docs for this and this is a known issue with this gadget)

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The timeline of Action Request System, drag the time line right/left to see the various versions of Remedy and when they are released and what new feature with that specific version.

More details need to added, I working on gathering more info regarding this, if you have some info that i can add to the timeline, please do contact me or just post a comment below.

Thanks to David J. Easter, Matt Laurenceau, BMCDN and ARSlist for providing much of the info and of course Google

Thread on ARSlist that helped a lot… History of AR Sytem

Note: Some of the earlier release dates of ARS are approximate and will be changed once the original dates are know and feature list will be added to all the versions very soon. Also working on gathering info on ITSM and related BSM products time line, any help regarding this will be much appreciated.

Feel free to contribute to the timeline project by sending info or any screen shots of earlier versions.

Namaste

Venkat