BMC adds IBM Cloud, Watson to Helix solution

BMC is expanding the Helix solution with the addition of an insight engine from IBM and additional clouds of choice, including the IBM Cloud.

With the addition of the Watson insight engine from IBM, BMC is extending the cognitive capabilities of the BMC Helix solution, by delivering cognitive insights across structured and unstructured federated knowledgebases for customers and improving their service experiences.

"The most powerful outcome of BMC Helix is choice," says BMC digital service management president Nayaki Nayyar.

"With BMC Helix, you gain the ability to choose the cloud that you want, and by combining the power of IBM Watson, deliver cognitive service experiences of the future.

IBM Cloud has been added to the platforms that BMC Helix is available on, also including enterprises Azure, AWS, and BMC Cloud.

"As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates and clients look to multi-cloud for flexibility and agility, it's critical that organisations have the ability to leverage Watson across all of their data, whether that data lives in private clouds, public clouds, or on-premises IT environments," says IBM Watson general manager Beth Smith.

"Our partnership with BMC will empower organisations to use IBM's AI and hybrid cloud capabilities to derive insight from their data and transform their service management operations."

According to a research study with IDG and BMC, 80% of the CIOs surveyed stated that cognitive technologies are critical for digital transformation and are looking to leverage technologies like AI/ML, chatbots, and virtual agents to help assist in their efforts.

At the core of the BMC Helix Cognitive Service Management offering are three key attributes, including cloud, containers, and cognitive capabilities.

The offering includes:

• Discovery - Helps businesses discover assets and services across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.  
• ITSM - Delivers predictive service management through auto-classification, assignment, and routing of incidents; includes embedded multi-cloud capabilities to broker incidents, changes, and releases across cloud providers.  
• Business Workflows - Enables extension beyond IT to lines of business like HR, facilities, and procurement.  
• Digital Workplace - Provides omni-channel conversational experiences for end users beyond web to Slackbot, Chatbot, SMSbot, and Skypebot.  
• BMC Helix Platform - Offers a cloud-native microservices-based platform that helps companies extend, customise, and integrate through REST APIs.