IT management software firm BMC is transforming its product base, launching a digital enterprise strategy designed to unify all of its offerings.
The firm, which has built or acquired multiple brands for its management tools over the years, has released an IT strategy that it says will help companies transform their IT while keeping legacy systems running.
“There’s a duality to the IT world which is how do we provide these compelling mobile digital services to customers and employees in a way that’s trusted, secure, available and stable,” said Paul Appleby, EVP of worldwide sales and marketing at the firm.
Firms with legacy equipment need to move quickly, providing digital services to their users, while also maintaining older systems. Newer firms working at hyperscale must still manage overwhelming complexity in their systems, he added. BMC’s new digital strategy hopes to help both kinds of firm.
It consists of four key disciplines: IT service management, enterprise automation, infrastructure optimization, and service assurance. The firm ties them all together with what it highlights as a fifth part of the strategy: analytics, orchestration, and policy. This is a common foundation for organizing it all, says the marketing on its site.
All of this makes for some nice looking boxes and circles, but what does it mean in practice? Very little in terms of current product enhancements or rebranding, which Appleby calls “evolutionary”.
“We’re evolving from being a point solutions company. So you’re seeing a company in the midst of that transformation and that journey,” he said, adding that the firm has a lot of strong product brands and is working out how to manage them.
Neither did the firm roll out any major product enhancements with its strategy announcement. “What we’re doing is taking a modern or contemporary team-based approach to development,” Appleby said, highlighting the need for a single point of focus around architectural decisions. The person responsible for that will be Bill Platt, whom it hired away from Amazon Web Services as its chief architect. He joined BMC in May this year.
“We already delivered a set of products aligned to those common principles including common UX design,” Appleby said, adding that CIOs could expect a series of 4-6 product launches in time that would support the strategy.
The firm unveiled version 9 of its Remedy platform for service management in May, and its Control-M Application Integrator in June. It also acquired a SaaS-based infrastructure management technology from Boundary earlier this week.
This represents an attempt at transformation for BMC, which was downgraded to a junk stock by S&P in 2013 after announcing a deal to be acquired by Bain Capital and Golden Gate capital, which effectively took the public firm private. The downgrade reflected the firm’s high debt levels, said analysts.
The following April, Moody’s issued its own downgrade just as the firm raised $750m to pay shareholders including Bain. BMC has reorganized itself following the buy-out, bringing customer-facing functions such as post-sales support, technical services and account management under a single chief customer officer.
