BMC

What do you think of BMC’s ProactiveNet?

Sevcik and Wetzel — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:52:41 -0500

BMC's ProactiveNet Analytics product is the subject of this week's application performance management solution profile and user feedback forum. Acquired in 2007 to round out BMC's business service management solution set, BMC ProactiveNet now nests within the BMC service assurance solution family.

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What we saw at Interop NY

Sevcik and Wetzel — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:26:22 -0400

Last week’s Interop in New York City was eerily normal considering the carnage Wall Street was experiencing just blocks away. Although attendance was modest, vendors told us there were enough qualified and savvy buyers to make the show worthwhile for them. Word is that IT budgets are not being frozen despite economic uncertainty—at least not yet.

The coolness factor of the show was kicked up several notches by the fact that a third of the hall was devoted to Web 2.0-themed exhibitors with names like KickApps, Yuuguu, Kapow Technologies, and Zude. The Web 2.0 portion of the show drew bigger crowds than the “legacy” portion as curious attendees explored new (and opportunistically repositioned) wares. A small portion of the hall was also devoted to Mobile Business Expo, which had a legacy feel to it.

All things virtual featured prominently at this fall’s show, telepresence came into its own, and desktop videoconferencing solutions were prominent. With travel costs skyrocketing, we predict telepresence and desktop video will be up front and center at Interop next spring. Desktop videoconferencing has been around a long time, and may finally be catching on. If so, brace yourselves for a Pandora’s box of enterprise network headaches opened by new infrastructure and large bandwidth demands. The sheer scale of desktop deployments can quickly overload network links and QoS deployments.

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GroundWork's Silver Bullet: 87% Cost Savings Over HP

Matthew Nickasch — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:39:20 -0400

Simple question: Would you like to save 87% on a Network Monitoring System for your enterprise? The simple answer is almost always an enthusiastic "yes!" Groundwork Open Source made this substantial cost savings study "real" this morning in a press release and cost comparison study, detailing the potential savings from Groundwork Open Source vs. HP Operations Manager. In a head-to-head comparison study of initial licensing, installation costs and recurring costs over a three-year period for a 3,000-node environment, GroundWork Open Source was found to provide the following advantages when compared to equivalent HP Software offerings." "This study examines in detail the cost savings offered by GroundWork relative to comparable offerings of HP software," said Tim Clark, partner at The FactPoint Group. "The results of this study were based off of data gathered from the April 2008 HP Software BTO Price Guide, a combination of customers who have used HP software and collaboration with HP software resellers." (GroundWork) I had the opportunity to talk with Debra Curtis, a research vice president in the Gartner IT Operations Management group. She clearly highlighted that the 'big four' network management system vendors (HP, BMC, CA, IBM), simply do not have a single dominant share in the market. Specialist vendors, like GroundWork, are able to deliver on impressive feature sets at a reduced capital cost. When asked about the risk of corporations investing in an open-source NMS solution, Curtis noted that "(investing in) open-source is not an additional source of concern."

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Big 4 management vendors squeak by with a passing grade, garner little confidence from Gartner attendees

Denise Dubie — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:15:14 -0400

If IT infrastructure and operations management specialists could hand out report cards to BMC, CA, HP and IBM, the comment they might include would be: "Shows slight improvement."

An impromptu poll of more than 355 attendees (exact number of responses were difficult to calculate on-the-fly) at the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit in Orlando Monday showed that 50% of attendees in the keynote session would give the market-leading big four management vendors a grade of C. Some 17% gave the big four a D grade, 4% determined they deserved an F and 15% offered the "incomplete" option. One percent said the market leaders deserved an A and 14% gave them a B.

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Management's numbers game

Denise Dubie — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:12:13 -0400

I've always believed I was destined to write about management software, based mostly on the fact that the management software market is dominated by four vendors and four is my favorite number. Think what you will.

But lately challengers to BMC, CA, HP and IBM have been threatening to change the perfect number four into six, seven or more. Vendors such as EMC, Symantec, Microsoft and even Cisco say they will shake up the market so much that the big four will find themselves at the bottom of the list. And smaller management software makers continue to make noise about how company size doesn't matter all that much if the software doesn't work.

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Expect more automation acquisitions, activities from the Big Four

Denise Dubie — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:28:36 -0400

Management software market watchers are trained to look at three other companies when one of the Big Four makes a move. One could say that habit comes from years of experience or industry savvy, but honestly not noticing the chain reaction any move among these constant competitors kicks off would be more of a challenge.

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BMC boasts all-time high revenue; bolsters confidence with BSM adoption

Denise Dubie — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:30:26 -0400

BMC Thursday announced its fiscal 2008 revenue, which the company reports marks an all-time high. BMC brought in $1.73 billion in fiscal 2008, with an 11% increase in total revenue in the management software vendor's fourth quarter.

More important perhaps is the fact that BMC logged $88 million in BSM (business service management) bookings, which the company and industry watchers say indicates customer adoption of BMC's strategic take on management software as well as potential future revenue growth for BSM offerings. BSM bookings were up 16% in the fourth quarter over the same quarter a year ago.

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The World Needs “BSM Lite”

Sevcik and Wetzel — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:32:52 -0400

Business Service Management (BSM) is the holy grail of good IT management, and achieving it using the current crop of IT management tools from the "big four" management platform vendors is about as hard as finding the real holy grail. The world needs a simpler, less expensive, more responsive way of achieving BSM.

First, let's define BSM. There are several definition sources, the most comprehensive of which is found on Doug McClure's blog. We were surprised to learn that despite the fact that he works for IBM Tivoli, he presents a clear headed and not a product driven BSM view (probably due to his hands-on experience in many BSM engagements).

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A Cheap and Easy Path to Business Service Management

Sevcik and Wetzel — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:25:25 -0400

Remember those View-Master Stereoscopes when you were a kid? You could see a three-dimensional view of the Grand Canyon or Mickey Mouse that gave you more information than either two-dimensional view. Over the last two months we have laid out a path to IT performance management and made a case for two separate but equal views of performance: an infrastructure view (columns) and application view (rows). To achieve a complete IT performance picture, you need to develop both views and then integrate them into a "stereoscopic view" that constitutes business service management (BSM). And getting that view does not have to be hard, or break the bank.

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The Performance Management Vendor Lineup: Who Manages What?

Sevcik and Wetzel — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:48:46 -0400

Lots of vendors support infrastructure performance management (IPM) or application performance management (APM) as defined in our previous postings. At the risk of taking a few arrows, we have assigned vendors to the aspect of performance management upon which their products focus. Although admittedly incomplete, the following representative list attributes at least 10 product vendors to each bucket. Yes, some vendors do provide a few features that can be viewed as also delivering aspects of the other view, but we felt it justifiable to assign each vendor to the bucket where their offering is strongest.

IPM
AdventNet
Castle Rock Computing
InfoVista
Ipswitch
Kaseya
ManageEngine
NetIQ
Netmon
Nimsoft
Oblicore

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RE: BMC releases discovery, topology applications

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:01:43 -0500

Are there any actual users out there that can tell me about the depth of SNMP capability of this product? For example, is the information all logical or does it actually map to anything physical within the database?

The end of BMC's .Net identity-management suite

Tue, 29 May 2007 01:07:11 -0400

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