Importing Incidents from Remedy - Back-dating Processes

I am investigating the possibility of importing existing open incidents in Remedy into ServiceDesk.  The Remedy db is hosted on an Oracle db and it looks feasible to read from this, create SD incidents and populate information from Remedy into them using workflow.  It is expected there will be somewhere between 2000 to 4000 open incidents to import so the exercise is well worth while.

 

The challenge we have is the business would like us to retain the original start dates from the Remedy tickets.

 

I've already asked Symantec support and they have confirmed they have no tools to help with the import and that workflow doesn't have any components that allow the definition of a start date/time when creating a process.

 

I would think that most environments would like to import existing incidents from other helpdesk solutions and retain their existing date/times.  Has anyone else looked into this before?  Any solutions?