Support Central

Premier Support is BMC’s enriched support offering¹. Premier customers benefit from personalized attention, proactive guidance and solution expertise that help enable customer organizations’ successful long-term strategy and desired outcomes with the BMC solution(s) covered by Premier.

BMC Premier Support is offered for both on-premise and SaaS implementations and is available in two levels. The resources and deliverables available within each offering level are grouped in bundles as follows:

BMC Premier Support is available for BMC designated products and subscriptions in Standard and Emerging Markets. In general, the deliverables and resources described below are for use in connection with a single BMC product instance in one production environment. Customers seeking to cover additional instances or products or to extend the geographical coverage shall be required to purchase additional bundles.

During a product migration, the Premier team may provide guidance and case oversight to support the product in the new environment as it is provisioned and configured. Once the new environment is live and becomes the active production environment, Premier resources and deliverables will be provided only for the new environment.

BMC Premier Support Foundation customers receive the following resources and deliverables during local business hours in the region for which BMC Premier Support was contracted. BMC Premier Foundation as a stand-alone service is not available for all customers.

For on-premise customers, BMC Premier Support provides Response Times, defined here. The BMC definitions for Impact (Severity) levels 1-4 can be found here. The Premier Response Times apply to the region(s) where BMC Premier Support is contracted.

For designated products that meet BMC’s customer threshold requirements, Premier customer cases are handled by a team of technical support analysts who focus on Premier cases. As a result, they build familiarity with Premier customer environments and are able to resolve Premier cases expeditiously. The Premier team ensures pending actions are acted on in a timely manner, whether owned by BMC or customers. Open cases for Premier customers are inspected regularly with an eye toward timely resolution.

BMC Premier Support provides a portion of an assigned Premier Support Account Manager’s resources to deliver weekly case status reports and manage critical cases end-to-end to ensure timely resolution. When a Premier Foundation customer opens a case with Severity 1 (Critical), the Premier Support Account Manager will be notified and engage with both the customer and BMC Customer Support.

In addition to weekly case status reports, the Premier Support Account Manager will also provide a support trending and analysis report on a monthly basis.

In addition to features and deliverables available with BMC Premier Support Foundation, BMC Premier Support Gold customers also receive the following deliverables in connection with a single BMC product.

The Premier Support Account Manager (PSAM) delivers high touch, strategic account oversight, engaging the right resources needed to support the customer’s requirements and objectives. With Premier Support Gold, customers receive expanded attention from their assigned PSAM, expanding beyond the Foundation-level resources included in Premier Support Foundation.The PSAM is responsible for building a deep understanding of the customer’s business and technology objectives and driving a Service Delivery Plan that helps the customer achieve those objectives. The PSAM owns the communication with the customer across multiple channels. For Gold customers only, this includes real-time federated chat and the private customer community site.

Expanded Premier Support Account Manager resources can be purchased with the inclusion of additional Governance & Communication bundles.

Hosted by the PSAM on a cadence agreed with the customer, governance meetings include at a minimum the following topics: 

Overall health of the product and the Premier engagement

Progress of in-focus initiatives and activities

Recommendations arising from the Product Insights Assessment, SME sessions, Upgrade runbooks, etc²

Incident Analysis Reviews

Status of high priority issues

For SaaS customers, Premier provides oversight for problem management and change requests

Developed jointly between the Premier team and the Premier customer, the Service Delivery Plan is a living document detailing the customer’s priorities and desired outcomes related to the BMC solution. 

The Premier Support Account Manager will coordinate with the Premier Customer to review progress and achievements against the Service Delivery Plan, adding or revising activities and timelines as appropriate. During the Service Delivery Review, the Premier team will also present a Summary Health Dashboard showing the health of multiple aspects of the product implementation and summary recommendations. The Service Delivery Review will be delivered up to 4 times per year.

Where available and possible, Premier resources may meet onsite with the customer up to 4 times per year for Gold customers. At BMC’s discretion, both the PSAM and PSS may participate in a single Site Visit. Site Visit Agendas will be agreed between the customer and the Premier team prior to the visit.

The BMC Premier Support Account Manager will deliver Executive Summary health status and operational metrics reports for Premier Customers as agreed.

A designated Premier Support Specialist (PSS) will provide the Premier customer with technical guidance and oversight for their specific implementation and participate in project release milestones and upgrades. The Premier Support Specialist (PSS) leads Subject Matter Expert sessions and performs the Product Insights Assessment.

No more than once a year, the Premier customer may request a different PSS if customer believes different subject matter expertise is required. Requests to change the PSS must be submitted in writing to the PSM with 30 days advance notice. 

Expanded Premier Support Specialists resources may be purchased with the inclusion of additional Risk Mitigation packages.

Premier will deliver a formal Incident Analysis Review for Severity 1 (Critical) issues impacting the production environment when requested.

The Incident Analysis Review will include a description of the business impact, corrective actions taken and recommended, and lessons learned.

A Premier Support Specialist will perform a Product Insights Assessment up to twice a year, limited to a single BMC product in one production environment³. Analysis is undertaken on the overall application usage trends, supportability, configuration, performance and functionality. Insights to product use and recommendations are formally documented and presented to the customer, and then tracked to implementation as part of governance calls.

³ For SaaS customers, Product Insights Assessment is only available for the ITSM core product

BMC will provide perpetual federated chat access between customers and their PSAM and PSS resources for the duration of their Premier Support service contract where feasible. The federated chat will enable live chat capabilities between customer and BMC teams during business hours.

The Premier team will work with the customer to help them understand new features and benefits of new version and to understand what the impact will be to customer use cases. Best practices advice for customer owned elements of upgrade testing, customization reconciliation and repair will be provided. The PSAM will establish a cadence of upgrade checkpoints to discuss status of upgrade activities and actions to resolve any blocking issues. For SaaS customers, the PSAM will coordinate with BMC Operations and customer to schedule the upgrade in production.

On-premise customers also receive an upgrade runbook which details the upgrade process for a single product instance in a designated production environment. The runbook will be customized to address the Premier customer’s unique environment.

In HDI sessions the PSS leads technical Q&A with the customer. Informal and brief in nature, customers are free to bring any topics related to the product covered by Premier. HDI sessions will be scheduled on a cadence agreed between the customer and the PSS. Topics requiring more in-depth discussion will be transferred to a SME session.

These customer-driven sessions are structured, interactive sessions and knowledge transfer engagements allowing customers to have deep technical focus on topics which are critical to furthering progress with product functionality, usability, performance and risk mitigation.

Premier Support Gold customers receive up to 4 SME sessions per year

For existing BMC Premier Gold customers who need coverage for a new product or additional capacity for an existing product within the same time zone. Included with the add-on service are Foundation, Governance, Risk Mitigation and Enablement bundles. Site visits are limited to 2 per year where available and possible.

¹ The following Premier offerings have been discontinued: Helix Premier Success Enterprise and Helix Premier Success Advocate.

² BMC MarketZone Products are not eligible to be enrolled in Premier Support.

³ Available with purchase of Risk Mitigation and Enablement bundles

⁴ For SaaS customers, Product Insights Assessment is only available for the ITSM core product

These Premier Support Offerings are no longer available for purchase to new customers.

• BMC Helix Premier Offering Description
• Premier Support Definition for On Premise Products