BMC's vision for the cloud
BMC CTO Kia Behnia spoke with CNET about the company's vision for cloud services, and where the opportunities are for private clouds.
For a company with an $8 billion market cap, we really don't hear too much about BMC. And yet, when I met CTO Kia Behnia this week, I couldn't help but be very impressed by the company's focus on the cloud and its vision for where much of enterprise IT is likely to be heading.
According to Behnia, BMC currently has more than 85 customers for its cloud services products, primarily large companies looking into both public and private clouds as ways to enhance their environments.
From Behnia's perspective, the primary opportunity for the private cloud remains in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and providing software-as-a-service (SaaS) to users within an organization. Behnia referred to the private-cloud adoption curve as one that is about "different money."
Banks, for example, may find value in running certain services in public cloud environments, but may find a bigger gain in having shared private cloud services with other banks.
Service providers such as Verizon, along with government entities, have found that they can service a wide number of users--small and mid-size organizations--through service offerings in what are effectively public clouds, whereas enterprises are finding that they can keep 90 percent of their workloads behind the firewall in private installations.
End users need to trust their provider, but they don't necessarily need to know the specific technology running their services. That said, BMC's tools support both public and private cloud scenarios. In fact, Behnia repeatedly stated that the company is focused on "everything," meaning not just its own tools and services, but being able to support the ongoing evolution of enterprise IT.
As part of that evolution, Behnia said there is a huge opportunity around mobility and the consumer-ization of IT. The connection to cloud computing is being able to access your information from any device. This lets the IT department be less of a help desk and more of a service provider.
Behnia also spoke about BMC's ongoing acquisition strategy, which he said will continue, though the company has put a great deal of effort into engineering its own products so it can acquire and add components that it needs.
Overall, I was very impressed with the product demos and overall vision from BMC. And while enterprise IT rarely feels future-forward, it appears BMC has a much larger head-start on becoming a dominant cloud tool provider than any other large vendor.