Situation

 

Following a strategic review looking at all range of options, a large international financial services trading software group decided to upgrade its BMC Remedy ITSM (IT Service Management) on-premise client support system. Remedy was selected as the platform of choice for delivering an ITIL ITSM best practice template such that all companies in the group could in due course be onboarded onto it to ensure consistent ways of working, reporting and performance benchmarking. 

Aim was asked to implement the upgrade to the three Remedy environments – development, pre-production and production. The nature of the global financial business meant that cutover to the production environment had a very narrow window when the system could be taken down – late Friday evening till early Sunday morning.

 

Solution

 

Using a well-rehearsed in-place upgrade approach whilst also co-running a business release, the Aim team was able to successfully commence the upgrade process – development then pre-production environments - using the latest out of the box version of Remedy then migrating current version system customisations and data - database, application layers and mid-tier web layer of the system. Then finally to the production environment.

A key aid in the upgrade was Alderstone’s CMT tool. CMT is a useful tool that de-risks data migrations between Remedy environments and also from other platforms to Remedy. Aim uses CMT for all its Remedy upgrades and for migrations from ServiceNow to Remedy, as apart from de-risking migration it also reduces the amount of consultancy resource that would otherwise be required.  Alderstone also offers consultancy services to ensure optimal use of the CMT tool.

CMT was used in the migration of development to pre-production environments, then finally incremental upgrade to production environment as part of cutover process. Aim applies an extremely granular cutover plan to production, whereby all the necessary activities are set out with minute to minute precision to ensure that cutover was safely delivered in the narrow release window.

 

Results

 

The upgrade was delivered successfully with zero downtime post cutover. Aim offered early life support (ELS) to ensure quick responses to any unforeseen issues, but the upgrade was accurate and clean and ELS was stood down after only 3 days.

The project was another upgrade success for Aim and delivered a stable and future-proofed platform to allow the trading software group to be the recipient of new functionality, a better tuned performing system and, most importantly, an ITSM platform that was the driver of consistent processes and ways of working across the group for all its companies.