BMC leads BSM market

By Kirsten Doyle for BMC Software

Prague, 23 May 2007

The Forrester Wave Business Service Management Survey found BMC Software leads the business service management (BSM) space, although competitors are hot on its heels.

Forrester analysed several BSM vendors, across several criteria, and found that, thanks to its early adoption of BSM, BMC is 12 to 18 months ahead of its competitors in terms of the scope of its offerings.

The research house says BSM is changing the way vendors build management software products, and the way IT is using its management software solutions. It defines BSM as software that links business-focused IT services to the underlying IT infrastructure.

BSM allows IT to provide and improve service quality consistency and the related performance indicator, incident closure time. "This translates into cost savings and indirectly increases the respect for IT from other executives within the company," says Thomas Mendel, VP and research director at Forrester.

He says, by aligning BSM with ITIL processes and workflow automation, BMC is slowly winning its strategic partner position in the enterprise accounts. "Success comes at a price though; in order to consolidate its position, the company must continually innovate."

Aligning business needs

According to the report, BMC is one of the "big four" vendors in the IT management software market. "Its solutions cover enterprise systems applications, databases and service management."

Forrester says BMC pioneered the BSM concept as a way to improve the alignment of business needs with IT operations.

To assess the state of the BSM arena, Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the top vendors, and established a set of 26 evaluation criteria, grouped into three high-level categories.

The first of these was current offerings, looking at functionality, support for standards, product architecture, and evaluated solutions based on products, features and capabilities.

Secondly, it looked at strategy, encompassing target markets and approach, including planned and future releases, sales and implementation strategies, partnerships and presence.

Finally, Forrester examined vendors' market presence, assessing financials, installed base, staff size and structure.

"We favoured those vendors that made the connection between infrastructure and business services, and conducted business impact analysis," says Mendel.