An initiative launched this month by BMC Software to develop API linkages that extend the reach of its business service management platform out to resources held in public or private clouds is the first of many developments in the area, a top executive has confirmed.
“There is more to follow,” David Greene, VP Marketing told us. “As cloud services continue to develop we will continue to push the capabilities of our software.”
The reason such developments are needed in the arena is because the relationship between systems management software and the systems infrastructure is changing, he explained.
“It is changing because the infrastructure is no longer static. In the physical world, once the infrastructure is deployed it is fixed. In the cloud, things are very different with management software being used to create the infrastructure that then needs to be managed.”
Greene claimed a set of product releases had been mapped out for the next six months and more which addressed this and other new systems management scenarios.
Earlier this month the Houston, Texas-based vendor announced the arrival of interface adapters for BMC’s Atrium Orchestrator change management tool that will allow administrators to invoke APIs in the Amazon EC2 storage service, and provision and de-provision storage resources held in a public cloud.
It’s understood that this would be followed by similar developments for other services, as well as features and additional capabilities to enable better management of virtualised environments, on or off premise.
“Expect some out of the box integrations that will address monitoring and service assurance, service support and service automation,” he also said.
The executive also noted that a latest release of the BMC asset management software combined with its configuration management database system addressed another soft spot in virtualisation management.
Tracking virtual machine assets across the virtualisation lifecycle is seen as a challenge, he suggested.
Rather than deploy new virtualisation management tools launched by companies with names such as Vizioncore, Virtual Instruments or Veeam, Greene said BMC hopes customers would see the advantage in being able to manage virtualised assets out of the same infrastructure management stack that is used to control physical assets.
“We want to develop a management system that can treat VMs just like any other part of the asset lifecycle. Some customers are already controlling VM assets and managing compliance using the current asset software suite,” he claimed.
