In the past 12 months BMC has been on a $1.85bn acquisition binge that has seen it break into the top tier of independent software vendors. It has paid $285m for performance management firm BGS, spent $915m buying Boole & Babbage and its Command/Post console manager, and this month took out New Dimension, the provider of the Control operations management suite, with a $650m cash purchase. By the start of its next fiscal year, BMC is likely to rank number five in the world, with 5,000 staff, over 4,000 customers and forward revenues well in excess of $1.5bn. The company claims that by dipping into its basket of over 300 software utilities, its customers could manage aspects of application availability of almost every form and manner.
BMC says it now has software to manage systems running across all the major platforms including OS/390, Unix, NT and the internet. It says its products can cope with workloads and packaged applications running on all the popular databases and across web application servers, and can handle all sorts of middleware variants, and email or office messaging options. It will sell software for event management, performance analysis, capacity planning, backup and recovery, through to console management, job scheduling, output management and security administration. All told, BMC’s system management tools cover mostly all the dull but essential back room support duties involved in keeping mission- critical applications running across highly-distributed enterprise systems.
New Dimension’s Control technology has a mainframe bias but is strong in that it covers all of the key areas of operations management dealing with scheduling, single sign-on, load balancing, output control and the like. Its products are well engineered and rated as being strong technically. The company has never been particularly strong itself, however. Financially, its performance has always looked unremarkable and the company had a habit of changing its name every few years in an effort to reinvent itself.
It has an established sales outlet in the US, but elsewhere it has relied heavily on Boole & Babbage for its living. The two companies have always been joined at the hip in Europe, with sales of Control accounting for up to 30% of Boole’s European revenue stream, so the acquisition was in the cards. The purchase of New Dimension was always viewed as a likely addendum to the Boole & Babbage acquisition, confirmed Tim Young of BMC UK. The only cause for any pause was that, to some extent, the Control products are a little outside of the traditional scope of BMC, which is fixated on applications and data management.
As such, there are some stiff challenges ahead, Meta Group confirms. The whole process of retrofitting application-level monitoring and management capability within the Boole & Babbage – and now New Dimension – system level monitoring products is going to occupy BMC for some years to come.
Looking forward, BMC says the plan is to chase after more of the market that is currently occupied by Computer Associates and Tivoli. It says it will retain its strong utility approach to enterprise systems management (ESM) software but it is hoping its added stature will lead to more than the bit part it has so far had in the play for the ESM framework market. To date, BMC has had to leave most of the business of scheduling and distribution management to its framework partners. In future, it intends to pursue more of this work for itself. Increasingly, this will bring it head to head with Computer Associates and Tivoli but also with the likes of Compuware, Platinum and HP
The Boole & Babbage buy allows us to add console management features without any of the framework baggage, claimed Young. We’ll continue to focus on the run-time environment with systems to keep mission-critical applications in flight. But where a customer is looking at job scheduling or access control, then we’d like to provide that, too.
The main things BMC wants from New Dimension are its job scheduling programs, its report distribution and enterprise output management software, and an associated security and administration suite. Of most interest though is the flagship Control-M/Workload module which is already used extensively to manage mainframe batch windows. In the field, BMC sales staffs can start to pitch the job scheduling product as an alternative to Tivoli’s Maestro (which IBM bought from Unison) or Platinum’s AutoSys.
The New Dimension tools are already closely aligned to Boole&Babbage’s Command/Post suite, a product that’s built around a family of other tools and takes information from them to provide a consolidated view of the entire managed environment. The operations tools from New Dimension (and asset management software from MainControl) fill gaps in the Command/Post system, to provide a capability that many other systems management environments do not have.
There’s no doubt that its extensive product portfolio gives BMC considerable reach in the enterprise systems management space, but managing product development of such a complex mix of tools is going to prove challenging. It could also easily lead to difficulties in the distribution channel.
Undoubtedly, the main fix for BMC will continue to be the 50 big multi-national blue chip accounts it derives the bulk of its revenues from. But its Patrol product has mass-market prospects (it is already being bundled into Compaq’s Insight Manager suite, for instance) while elsewhere, there could soon be thousands of small and mid-size businesses hungry for SAP availability management software. BMC says it will meet these demands with new product suites and utility bundles.
Already slated for release in May are new R/3 application management, recovery and performance suites for the smaller SAP user. The R/3 Application Assurance Suite will include a dozen or so BMC utilities bundled and price-discounted as three product suites. Also flagged for release in May is an integrated version of BMC’s Patrol integrated with BSG Best/1. It will be the first deliverable from the numerous product integration initiatives now underway at BMC after its year-long purchasing spree.
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