Efficiency drives in data centres using an increasingly complex mix of resources are sustaining business in the systems management segment according to BMC Software Inc’s top European executive, who claims businesses see standardisation, consolidation and virtualisation initiatives as the surest way to improve asset utilisation and drive down costs.
Luca Lazzaron, VP and General Manager EMEA told us that projects that aim to squeeze inefficiency out of data centre operations invariably leads to increased complexity in the context of server configurations and system interdependencies.
“The more dislocated and the more complex the environment is, the better” the BMC executive said, as it plays to the way the company has developed and evolved its business service management proposition.
“We started by capturing information about what is happening across a business service, and providing service assurance support. Then we were able to start managing those issues of service delivery, and now with automation we can execute and fix an issue before it starts to cause service problems.”
He also said that in some cases, latest initiatives were leading some IT shops to reconsider how they have approached configuration management database deployment.
“I can think of three current and major projects at a bank, a telco company and at a large software house where the existing CMDB has been swapped out in favour of BMC’s software” he said.
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Latest work has led to some improved autodiscovery and dependency mapping features being fitted to the Atrium CMDB.
The company claims to be bucking the downturn and says demand is on the up, pointing to its last full quarter’s numbers which showed growth of 6.4%. Last full year revenues improved 12.6% to reach $1.86 billion.
Wall Street analysts view the company’s recent BladeLogic OEM partnership with Cisco and its reseller agreement with Dell as market developments that should help the business service software house further penetrate the data centre space.
Luca said the company was working with Cisco in selected accounts as it assesses with real customers the proposition they have developed around Cisco’s Unified Computing System next generation data centre platform, and its incorporation of certain elements of BMC’s business service management suite.
Last month BMC put out new release management features as part of its Version 7.5 ITSM package to better orchestrate change controls across platforms running Unix to Windows and VMware. “It improves cycle times by 30% to 40%” Luca claimed.
“The the latest release also brings tighter integration with Remedy, software licensing and vendor relationship management operations. It means it is much easier to assess the IT estate, to establish which resources are being utilised well and which are not.”
In its latest version the system is also better able to unify systems management processes, irrespective of whether the resources being managed as part of business service delivery operations are physical or virtual assets.
