What exactly does BMC Software Inc, of Houston, Texas do? Well, try asking the company, like we did the other week, and we guarantee you will get some conflicting answers. Namely, BMC is not in the systems management market, only the application and database management spaces and therefore has no competition. Or, it is in the systems management arena and numbers Platinum Technology Corp and IBM Corp’s latest acquisition Tivoli Systems Inc among its rivals. Confused? We were. We also got an interesting array of answers when we asked if BMC was at all interested in repositories, bearing in mind that sometime opponent Platinum is chock-a-bloc with at least two of its own via acquisitions. Not at all, we were told one day, because customers do not want a grand repository, since that leads to a single point of failure, and repositories are really only for data warehousing anyway, and of course BMC is not into data warehousing, its recent agreement with Red Brick Systems Inc notwithstand ing! But then the following day, the company confessed that it is actually working on building its own repository, because its customers keep asking it to standardize on a single product! All this rather sad state of affairs leads us to agree with M arc Sokol, vice-president of advanced technology at Computer Associates International Inc whose CA-Unicenter may or may not compete with BMC’s Patrol. He concluded that the Houston outfit is just a little schizophrenic. We did however get some str aight answers out of BMC’s senior vice-president of research and development, Jim Juracek who revealed that the company’s first venture into all things World Wide Web-related will be via a Patrol Agent for the Internet and intranet which was release d on July 1, the same time frame for the next release of Patrol, version 3.1. This will be followed up by Patrol Knowledge Modules for Netscape Communications Corp’s Navigator browser and Microsoft Corp’s Explorer. BMC is also carrying out engineeri ng work on how to extract data repetitively from legacy sources and propagate it to HyperText Mark-up Language pages. The whole Internet family goes under the banner of Patrol Watch, with the eventual aim of giving users the ability to manage Patrol completely via the Web. Version 4.0 of Patrol due out in a year’s time will be predicated around Java and browser technology, he said. In case you thought BMC was rather behind the Web-enabling trend, company chief executive Max Watson told us We may be slow to announce our Internet strategy, but we’re ahead on deliverables. Everyone else announced their strategy a year in advance because they’re interested in seeing their share prices go up. It’s typical of us, we don’t do a lot of hype ahe ad of deliverables. We do things a little different. Juracek also told us BMC is hard at work on developing its own security product to administer a wide range of software, including operating systems, applications and databases. It is also looking to acquire itself some networking companies. One likely candidate would seem to be Network Catalyst Inc of Irvine, California, a provider of network and system support software for Digital Equipment Corp’s VAX and Alpha OpenVMS systems. Interesting ly enough, back in March 1995, the company announced a strategic partnership and joint development agreement with OpenVision Inc of Pleasanton, California, one of those companies with which, naturally enough, BMC does not compete. – Clare Haney
