BMC Helix builds one of the leading enterprise service management platforms, used by IT organisations across banking, telecoms, the public sector and beyond to automate their operations and manage the complexity they run on. Raul Alvarez, VP of Sales for the Americas, has a history with SXP that goes back fifteen years, to when BMC was bringing a new concept, Business Service Management, to market and needed a way to show customers what it could do for them rather than simply describe it.
A little over a year ago, he found himself in a comparable position. BMC had created another new concept, ServiceOps, which brings ITSM and ITOM together on a single platform, and as agentic AI capabilities were added to that platform, the problem of explaining it became more pressing. A new category is hard to convey by description alone. Customers need to see what it looks like in their own environment before they'll commit to it.
So he came back to SXP, this time to use a simulation to show customers what ServiceOps could do rather than tell them. The simulation puts participants in the roles of CIOs and IT decision-makers running an airport. They have infrastructure, a budget, services to keep running and KPIs. Across successive rounds, which stand in for days and weeks, teams decide which processes and technologies to introduce, review the performance those decisions produce, then decide again. BMC Helix capabilities enter the airport as investments that the teams can choose.
People are wary at the start. One participant asked whether they were about to play Fortnite, and the first round tends to be sceptical. Then the problem-solving instinct takes over. Nearly everyone in the room, Raul reckons, is a problem solver by trade, and once they recognise the airport's difficulties as versions of their own working day, they engage: discussing, taking notes, getting on top of the screen. Within a round or two, they've gone from "what's going on" to "let's fix this," and then, he says, they learn, and they laugh.
"Can you achieve that without a simulation? Maybe. But it would take months instead of days."
Scaling across a global business
The first session brought together twelve people from twelve companies. One of them, among the largest customers BMC has anywhere, according to Raul's account, was about to begin a transformation programme built on Helix technology and needed to train and align around a thousand people, spread across Europe and India. That customer ran the simulation virtually for the full group.
Aligning a thousand people through calls, communications and meetings would take weeks or months. Raul reckons the simulation does the same work of building common understanding in about three hours. He isn't claiming it replaces a transformation programme. It compresses the alignment a programme depends on and puts it up front, early, where it helps most.
What his customers want, he says, is to make the right decisions at the right time, and what usually slows that down is not a shortage of information but a shortage of shared understanding across the people who have to act. The simulation brings a room to consensus quickly, coaches a team through the trade-offs, and gives a customer a clear view of what the technology makes possible before the money is spent. Looking back at the decision to work with SXP again, with so much resting on explaining a new category well, he calls it a no-brainer.