BMC Sotware Inc of Houston, Texas is consolidating its open system strategy, which it launched in its bid to move away from the IBM mainframe database market, with the acquisition of Patrol Software Inc, the Australian Unix database and application event management company. BMC has already got Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc reselling the Patrol suite, which can now also pass information to Computer Associates International Inc’s CA-Unicenter. Although Tivoli Systems Inc’s Management Environment, CA-Unicenter, OpenVision and others can manage disks, batch jobs, security and software distribution, BMC appears to be farther down the application management track than any of the above. It hopes to have Patrol modules available for as many as 40 applications by the end of the year. The company claims Patrol is unique in offering application, database and server hardware management – in any combination thereof – via the use of intelligent agents which reside at each occurrence of a database or application, monitoring activity. Rather than passing all information back to a central console for action by an administrator or administration package, Patrol knowledge modules, which sit alongside the intelligent agents, provide a set of routine response guidelines that the agents can act upon without having to alert the console. The database knowledge modules in turn can be updated by Meta Desk, Manage and Change packages, which are effectively an extension of the company’s reorganization and back-up mainframe products to Unix and Windows NT, or the knowledge modules can call the console directly. Customers are not even required to buy a stand-alone Unix- or Windows95-based BMC console, which can run under SNMP managers such as OpenView, CA-Unicenter, SunNet Manager or a Tivoli framework. BMC plans to add key reorganization and log management features to the Meta suite next quarter. Like every company worth its salt these days, BMC is also developing an Internet angle for its Patrol products, which it says will be able to manage and monitor Web sites from later this year. BMC does 80% of its business on the mainframe – within two years it wants revenue to be split evenly between mainframe and client-server sales. Following BMC’s $119m third quarter turnover, up 31% on last time, Morgan Stanley has upgraded its investment recommendation to outperform from neutral. It has counted 23 new products from BMC this fiscal year with a further 22 due by year-end. BMC counts Platinum Technology Inc and Compuware Corp as its closest competitors. The company has appointed former Informix Software Inc marketing director, Andy Smith as European marketing director. It has restructured its European business, appointing country managers to run UK, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Belgian, Dutch and Scandinavian operations, each with their own sales and marketing teams and is gearing for high-volume distribution strategies. International license revenue grew 56% last quarter.
