BMC Software and Boole & Babbage will reveal a product integration roadmap 30 days after the acquisition of the latter by the former closes, expected around year-end. While B&B says it effectively ‘owns’ the mainframe or enterprise management console with its performance monitoring and management programs, BMC dominates the application management and utilities space at a different level. There is some overlap between their MQSeries products, but as both are now using the Nastel Technologies middleware to enable distributed management, configuration and administration of MQSeries sites, B&B claims that together they will be able to provide a more comprehensive solution than alternatives such as the Candle Corp software. Moreover B&B says that while rival Candle Corp may have 400 MQSeries users all told, it reckons that only about 80 are actually using Candle’s Command Center management software to administer their MQSeries applications. B&B says it has 125 customers using its Command Post software to manage MQSeries, while BMC has some 30 or so customers. It says that Candle has refused to provide details of its user base to market research companies and analysts are therefore not able to verify its claims. It thinks Candle’s focus on the Roma messaging interchange framework is detracting from the management technology from which it derives the majority of its revenues.
