The company has ceased development of its Patrol Storage Manager at the current version 2.2, and is redeploying the staff that were associated with the product. Those that cannot be employed elsewhere within BMC will be laid off, the company said.
There’s plenty of evidence that the market is not going to be profitable for all of the suppliers in the sector. They’ve been piling in for the last three years, and a few are packing their bags right now, said Dan Hoffman, director of BMC’s storage business unit. We may be the first to publicly do this, but there are plenty of smaller businesses that are in trouble, he added. Hoffman did not name the other companies that are packing their bags, however.
The SAN management and SRM sector has seen a great deal of product launches and acquisitions over the last few months. BMC’s rival Computer Associates Inc, claimed it has experienced strong demand for the first SRM and SAN management tool that it launched in December last year.
BMC didn’t make its decision based on the market. Our sales are going up the wazoo, said Marco Coulter, vice president of storage business strategy at CA.
The decision to pull out will be a blow to storage management start-up Invio Software Inc, whose storage provisioning software was to be OEMed by BMC, and integrated with the Patrol Storage Manager software. Hoffman said: That deal is in hold now.
Patrol Storage Manager 2.2 will continue to be supported, and BMC will continue to offer its current Knowledge Modules, which are plug-ins to the company’s Patrol systems management tool, covering basic monitoring of SAN elements such as switches. Hoffman said that despite the exit from SRM and SAN management, BMC will continue its application-based approach to storage management. We’re going up to the next level, he said.
Source: Computerwire
