BMC Software Inc has launched a major repositioning strategy to focus the company on what it calls Application Service Assurance, trademarked as ASA, ensuring the end user gets robust, uninterrupted service with good, consistent, performance and fast recovery in the event of a failure, from the applications and databases he or she is relying on. BMC’s director of application management product marketing for the Houston, Texas-based company’s Application Availability group Steve Lesem, says the company has to date provided a large number of point solutions in areas such as applications management and database management. What it is trying to do with the new strategy is to bundle some of the products into a set of three suites, application Availability, Performance and Recovery, and to present itself as the enabler to ensure the end user gets the service levels required. It also provides what it describes as domain solutions, which are the availability, performance and recovery functions for applications such as SAP, Oracle, MQSeries middleware, Windows NT BackOffice and others. Lesem claims one of BMC’s problems so far has been confusion in the market place between the offerings of the systems management framework providers such as Computer Associates International Inc and IBM Corp’s Tivoli Corp, and that of BMC. The framework vendors, he claims, focus on productivity in the IT department, rather than business productivity. Most offer error detection at the operating system level, for example, but do not offer application management or database management, nor do they yet offer the error correction and performance analysis that BMC does, Lesem says. He believes both Computer Associates and Tivoli are trying to flesh out their offerings with these services, but insists they cannot yet deliver, and he believes they are bumping into [BMC’s] deliverables with their marketing message. In other words, he says these companies are actually telling users they can deliver what only BMC can currently offer. The new strategy is not just a marketing move. It also involves fundamental changes in BMC’s organization, Lesem says. The research and development team has been re-organized into three groups to work on the Availability, Performance and Recovery suites, and the sales and marketing operation is also being reshuffled along these lines. The company is also working on new technology code-named Valencia, which will integrate the suites and bring together its two intelligent agent software offerings Patrol and BestOne.
