BMC Software Inc, the Houston, Texas-based software developer, has unveiled the first products from its recovery and storage management business unit, offering software for these areas in both the OS/390 and distributed systems markets.
The enterprise systems management player has long had disparate products for managing both recovery and storage functions, said Alan Skidmore, VP of distributed systems recovery. It was only late last year that it formed the specific business unit for storage, which thus came into existence with annual revenue of some $300m (out of a company total of $1.3bn in the year ending March 31).
Some of the Resolve products, as the recovery and storage management suite is now known, predate the business unit, while others have been developed to complete the portfolio. They now span the range of environments from OS/390 through Unix to NT, though Skidmore admitted that, at the moment, BMC’s background in mainframe software means that roughly 70% of the business unit’s revenue comes from that sector rather than distributed systems. For the latter half of 2000, Skidmore also forecasts the launch of a management tool for storage area networks.
The main competition for BMC’s storage and recovery management offerings is from Computer Asssociates Inc and IBM itself. Skidmore argues that, in relation to IBM, BMC enjoys platform independence. Meanwhile, the competitive advantage he hopes to exploit vis-a-vis CAI is an economic one, namely the fact that BMC’s software can be acquired piecemeal, rather than requiring the installation of a complete platform.
