BMC Treads Carefully Among The Giants
Posted by
Paul Korzeniowski
November 16, 2011
Since its founding in 1980, BMC Software has been successfully delivering management solutions to large enterprises. During that time, the vendor has been able to deftly maneuver around possible potholes to earn a top position (one that generated more than $2 billion for the company in fiscal 2011) in this highly competitive market sector.
But more work remains. Like other high tech segments, the management segment is experiencing slowing growth. The double-digit increases evident historically have given way to single digit growth. "There is a good possibility that consolidation will occur among the top tier management companies in the next few years," notes Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP at Forrester Research.
BMC may be a company ripe for the picking. The vendor is much smaller than behemoths such as HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. To avoid being swallowed up, BMC has focused on delivering high-level management functions, such as end user experience monitoring and cloud management. Time will tell if it is positioned well enough to withstand future market shifts.
Even though the economy has recently been wallowing, BMC has fared well. In 2011, its sales increased 8% from the previous year. "BMC has done a good job anticipating customer needs," says Mary Johnston Turner, research VP, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC.
Companies are searching for ways to leverage their IT systems. "With budgets being constrained, corporations are looking to increase staff efficiency through automation," explains Matthew Selheimer, assistant VP of Solutions at BMC.
BMC moved in this direction with its Business Service Management (BSM) initiative. These tools enable IT departments to manage their business services from service definition through service request to provisioning and configuration. The tools are designed to help enterprises monitor infrastructure performance, as well as generate the reports needed to ensure governance.
The movement to cloud computing has presented a significant challenge to established management suppliers like BMC. Its products were built to monitor traditional enterprise data centers rather than operate over network connections, the model that cloud computing relies on.
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