BMC's Big Push Into Service Automation

While BMC Software continues to focus on business service management, it has been quietly making a big push into the emerging service automation market. After purchasing RBA innovator RealOps this summer, this week BMC launched Service Automation, a set of solutions that automate the life cycle of IT-delivered business services, and also announced the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, a network compliance, change, and configuration management solution. With the centerpiece BMC Atrium CMDB, Marimba, RealOps, and now Emprisa, BMC is making substantial investments in the service automation market. The value proposition with service automation allows customers to manage their entire IT infrastructure, ranging from edge devices such as network and servers to the applications that provide the services demanded by the business.

While some key gaps exist in the technology portfolio, if BMC can continue to fill those holes and integrate the products it's bought, it will have a big leg up over its competition. Both BMC and Hewlett-Packard seem to realize the potential in this market, while the other large vendors are just sitting on the sidelines.