Houston, Texas-based BMC’s $42m acquisition of service management software specialist IT Masters on March 25 may have appeared small scale, but it has had a large impact on the company’s strategy, according to the company’s UK MD, Alan Smith. IT Masters was one of the smallest acquisitions in terms of money, but it’s more significant than the amount of money would imply, he said. It was the missing piece of the puzzle for us.
The acquisition of IT Masters’ MasterCell technology adds service impact management to BMC’s portfolio, enabling users to map IT assets to service levels and build dynamic models for BSM. MasterCell is the tool that allows us to define what a component is and match it to the business services, said Simon Teager, BMC’s field director for BSM, EMEA.
The MasterCell technology fits on top of BMC’s core IT operations and infrastructure management technologies, as well as its application management products and the IT service technologies it picked up with Remedy, which it acquired from Peregrine Systems Inc for $355m in cash in November 2002.
Although acquisitions have been important in the formation of the BSM strategy, Teager insists it is a long-term strategy that influenced the acquisitions, rather than the other way round. The strategy came before the acquisitions, we’ve been working on this for many, many months, he said. These acquisitions are the first fruits of the strategy and there’ll be many more to come in the coming months.
Teager admitted that the company’s service management vision is not complete, with software distribution being an obvious gap in the product portfolio. The only area we don’t have is software distribution, but we do have partnerships in place to deliver that, he said. BMC partners with Novadigm Inc and Marimba Inc, and believes that those partnerships are enough for now.
One area for potential acquisition is the auto-discovery space. There’s a plan to either develop or acquire the technology for that, but there’s no details on that at this stage, said Teager.
I’m not even sure there’s anything in the market that’s up to it at the moment, so it’s a buy or build approach, added Smith.
In the meantime, the BSM strategy is about more than just products, according to BMC’s VP of BSM, EMEA, Bert Meerman. Firstly it’s a strategy endorsed by everybody within BMC, he said. Secondly it’s a roadmap for BMC and for our customers. The third thing it is is a solution, a combination of products, services, methodology and strategy.
Indeed BSM will require customers to do a lot more than just deploy and integrate products, it will also require the identification and mapping of business processes. For this, BMC plans to partner with service providers and consultants, said Teager.
In order to deliver this to customers today, practically we have to do it through the people who deliver it and the processes through which it’s delivered, as well as the technology products. It may well be that customers need to get some external help to model the business services in the first place, he said.
BMC has no aspirations to become a business process modeling consultancy, so we’re looking for partnerships with management consultants, he continued. We have considerable skills in technology architectures and service management, but when we talk about BPM that is not an area that we intend to go into.
BSM is clearly a project rather than a product sell, and despite restricted IT budgets, BMC believes that customers will take up the strategy. Customers are telling us that they want to manage their IT systems from a business perspective, said Meerman. We think BSM is the solution to that.
Source: Computerwire
