GijimaAst to deliver service management solutions as a service to customers in South Africa.

BMC Software and GijimaAst are partnering to deliver a flexible service management offering that enables businesses to achieve business and IT alignment without the need to manage and maintain their own IT infrastructure.

The first to capitalise on the potential of the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, JSE-listed GijimaAst, is using BMC Remedy IT service management products and the ITIL-compliant BMC Atrium CMDB to provide fixed cost, unitised managed services to its customers.

GijimaAst divisional executive, Dan van der Westhuizen, says that the company's new services delivery business model, which "eliminates the need for our customers to acquire software - or the in-house skills needed to manage and maintain their ICT infrastructure" goes beyond outsourcing.

"We provide a modular on-demand or Software as a Service facility that allows us to manage our customers' IT services either by deploying our BMC technology in their environment or running their infrastructure, using BMC products, from our own central control and command facility.

"Either way, the customer has no capital outlay, no implementation costs and no compliance or licensing issues. He simply chooses from our shopping list of services which ones he needs and pays a fixed monthly subscription or sets a service level agreement with us.

"Obviously, the benefit to us is new annuity revenue streams. More importantly, though, it revolutionises the infrastructure landscape for any size of business - from a legal firm with five secretaries through to large enterprises who don't want the burden of managing and maintaining an increasingly complex ICT infrastructure.

"In other words, we're creating a new, more cost-effective, more efficient way for South African organisations to align their ICT with their business goals. It's an entirely new market for ICT providers."

Van der Westhuizen says GijimaAst did a lot of homework before choosing BMC Software. "There are dozens of service management tools out there. BMC became the obvious choice for several reasons. The first was the fact that it appears in Gartner's magic quadrant. Also, the products are mature and BMC invests a lot of money in ongoing development. The products literally live on the Internet - so we could begin to manage our customers' environments the moment they went online. A lot of BMC's competitors couldn't offer us this.

"Crucially, BMC's CMDB is at least six months ahead of any competing product. A lot of companies have simply rebranded old products and, in the process, have missed the point of what's really needed in a CMDB. And they tend to lock you into their other products.

"BMC's CMDB is federated, so it can be integrated with any database that has configuration information. For us, that was a very strong point.

"All these advantages enabled us to create an offering that is fast and easy to implement and provides a more predictable outcome for both the customer and GijimaAst."

BMC Software country manager for South Africa, Arjen Wiersma, says the benefits of business service management played a large role in GijimaAst's decision to choose BMC Software. "It is technology that carries a company's business processes. If your technology is not managed efficiently, it will directly impact on your ability to meet your business goals.

"In offering its vast expertise through managed services utilising BMC Software products, GijimaAst is enabling businesses to be more confident of their technology and, therefore, of their business services - without having to make a large investment in resources to achieve complex infrastructural BSM work themselves. They can get on with being profitable knowing that GijimaAst is managing what matters to their business."