Historically, the major challenge for the consolidation of BMC Helix ITSM systems has been the data migration component. The three principal data migration challenges when performing consolidation are:

• Poor performance—The AR System API, used by all legacy tools, is not engineered for data migration. It can take several, resource-intensive weeks to migrate all data in a BMC Helix ITSM application.
• Unique identifier clashes—Application unique Identifiers such as request IDs, group IDs and ticket numbers are unique only within a single BMC Helix ITSM system. Merging data without reconciling these unique keys seriously compromises data integrity and security and impacts the viability of the core BMC Helix ITSM application.
• Lack of control—Legacy data migration tools do not provide the capabilities for identifying, migrating, or transforming related sets of BMC Helix ITSM data. Even with the investment of significant development effort, it is challenging to achieve the control necessary to support the complex data migration and transformation operations necessary for consolidation.