BMC pins strategy on new consolidated products

BMC Software's betting on its relatively young business service management business for revenue growth, the company's president CEO, Robert Beauchamp, said on Wednesday.

The systems management software company this week hosted a customer conference, where the theme was business service management, a set of consolidated management tools meant to improve IT operations.

Beauchamp said that its business service management products are being used by hundreds of customers with thousands evaluating it. Its systems management competitors--IBM, Hewlett Packard and CA--lag BMC in this regard, Beauchamp claimed.

"Our strategy is to take advantage of the fact that we're in production...and just stay ahead," he said. He added that BSM has is "key" to the company's financial performance.

The idea behind business service management, according to analysts, is to create a model in software that represents how business applications depend on computing gear. By having a view of the dependencies between applications and the underlying computing infrastructure, IT administrators can more easily spot and prevent problems.

An important piece to this strategy is having a single systems management database which consolidates administration-related information in a single place, called a configuration management database (CMDB).

Beauchamp compared business service management (BSM) to the scope of business applications over time. Much like ERP applications automated back-office functions, BSM codifies IT operations in software and a single database.

"In the last three months, we've announced 50 new products all integrated through the CMDB. The secret to BSM is not the CMDB, it's the products that link into it," he said.