A few years back management software maker BMC started its journey toward automated IT service management with the introduction of its business services management (BSM) strategy.

Now an industry buzzword, BSM underpins most of BMC's distributed management efforts, and in particular its Atrium configuration management database (CMDB) promises to serve as the foundation for greater IT management efforts, industry watchers say. Now the vendor is making sure it has all its bases covered by providing new and upgraded products designed to extend the values of BSM down to the operations teams.

"BSM as a story has mostly been about IT service management and IT process management," says Tom Bishop, CTO at BMC. "Now we are looking to help IT operations manage and configure IT assess in a way that maximizes business services."

The company last week announced a set of new products and upgrades to several others. For instance, BMC Transaction Management Root Cause Analysis will correlate transaction data from multiple BMC tools and pull out the pieces that matter to IT operations, reducing the mean time to repair on performance problems. And not only does this application speed problem resolution, it also does so with business priorities in mind, Bishop explains.

"All of this information is now being viewed in context, rather than on its own. We filter out the non-relevant information and try to bring customers close to pure-bred diagnosis," he says. Available now, the new and upgraded products have been integration so that they share similar dashboards and provide unified service-level management analysis.

"BSM is a lifestyle change for many IT shops. In a way, it is about providing business process management for IT, and it reflects the level of maturity the industry is reaching," Bishop says.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.