BMC Software: customers, partners and analysts confirm that BSM is going mainstream

Speaking at the BMC Software Forum '06 today, Peter Armstrong, corporate strategist, BMC Software showcased its market leadership in Business Service Management (BSM). Delivering best-practice IT processes 'out of the box,' BSM is the most effective approach for managing IT from the perspective of the business.

BSM has gone mainstream as defined by the collective weight of:

* Increasing customer deployments aligned to a clear BSM strategy,
* Immediate financial benefits and positive ROI,
* Important BSM-focused partnerships with major solutions integrators,
* Product maturity with second-generation BSM solutions,
* Global professional and managed services commitments, and
* Significant industry analyst endorsements.

A recent Goldman Sachs2 published survey on IT spending plans shows BMC Software alone among its major competitors in gaining a greater share of IT spend - the clear result of an appreciation of the maturity of BMC Software's BSM solutions and the strategic imperative that is building among customers for BSM adoption. BSM provides a unified, integrated approach for managing IT assets, processes, and functions across the enterprise. Its importance is underscored by potential savings of up to 25 percent of overall IT. In addition, implementation of BSM - even in a phased approach - measurably improves an IT organisation's alignment with business objectives and rapidly increases the quality of its support levels, real and perceived. As a result, organisations at all levels of IT and process sophistication are adopting BSM to break down the barriers between IT infrastructure optimisation and business priorities.

"Discussions with clients over the past 12 months clearly indicate that BSM has become the primary means for IT to accomplish the goal of performing more like a business," stated Thomas Mendell, vice president and research director, Forrester Research. "By hitting all the stepping stones toward BSM, Forrester estimates that companies can save as much as a third of their IT operations budget. An estimated 76 percent of the IT budget goes to operations, so firms that implement BSM can potentially save 25 percent of their overall IT budget."3 "IT strategy has to be an integral part of business strategy - recognition of this is why the adoption of BSM is now growing quickly," commented Peter Armstrong, Corporate Strategist, BMC Software. "Enterprises have identified the business process as the most important element within a business, by aligning IT to maintain availability of these critical business processes, IT becomes business aware and begins running IT based on business decisions and impacts rather than technical capabilities."

BMC Software Leads BSM Market

"BMC launched its Business Service Management strategy three years ago, since that time, IT organisations all over the world have adopted BSM to manage IT from the business perspective in increasing numbers," said Armstrong. The company's success with BSM stems from its focus on delivering customers the right solutions to manage IT infrastructures with business goals and priorities in mind, Armstrong continued.

"BMC's launch of BSM showed its capacity to innovate," writes Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president, in his Forrester Research report dated February 27, 2006. "BMC shines by the quality of its overall solution."4

"The benefits of BSM are obvious, continued Armstrong. Not only do we see positive ROI from BSM projects but also IT cost savings, and tangible business benefits as well. By driving down the cost of IT operations, BSM increases the resources available for investment in IT innovation and development. Taking Forrester's analysis of BSM savings one step further, the amount of budget available for new IT innovation can effectively be doubled by implementing BSM."

Furthering BMC Software's leadership in BSM, the company recently introduced a series of new and integrated products, including a second generation Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Adding automated discovery, proactive incident and problem management, unified service level management, closed loop client management, and datacenter change management to its existing BSM arsenal, BMC Software now offers more integrated, expansive, and automated BSM and ITIL-enabling solutions. As a result, customers and partners experience quicker and easier implementations, greater ROI, improved visibility into their IT infrastructure, and a direct connection between IT and business priorities.