BMC Software Helps Predict, Prevent IT Nightmares

Gartner Data Center Conference

The accelerating adoption of virtualization, cloud computing and automation requires new and increasingly prescriptive management approaches, both to ensure high IT operations reliability and deliver consistently superior levels of IT performance.

Today, BMC Software (NASDAQ:BMC) announced BSM for Proactive Operations, featuring enhancements to the IT operations solutions that underpin its market-leading Business Service Management (BSM) platform. Building off the company’s recent Dynamic BSM announcement, the latest BMC BladeLogic, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC Capacity Management and BMC Atrium solutions are helping organizations shift to proactive, predictive and preventative IT operations.

"We make several changes to our Web site each day, any one of which can result in an outage costing tens of thousands of dollars,” said Jerry Gregg, Operations, Remedy, CMDB and service model administrator at CARFAX. "BMC Software is absolutely critical to our business, because it provides us with the hindsight and ability to rollback failed changes as well as the foresight to understand how a particular change can impact service levels. This information allows us to make better business decisions and maintain maximum Web site availability.”

"So many IT organizations continue to rely on end user calls to the help desk to notify them of outages and slowdowns,” said Debra Curtis, research vice president at Gartner. "Unfortunately, this puts IT in a reactive state where the problem has already occurred and IT needs to react to isolate and resolve the situation. Proactively preventing problems, anticipating potential issues and correcting them before they affect the business, makes IT more efficient and improves customer satisfaction.”

For years, BMC’s BSM platform has been a driving force in helping organizations simplify and automate IT. Along with new product releases, BMC is unveiling a unique, proven and prescriptive, best-practices-based approach to helping organizations achieve proactive operations quickly and cost effectively:

Proactive Availability and Performance Management integrates predictive analytic capabilities with preventative automation in real time, allowing IT operations to focus on outage avoidance instead of reacting to failures.

Based on a patented technology platform, the latest versions of BMC Event and Impact Management and BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management help organizations predict IT issues before customer impact and automate the remediation process, significantly reducing complexity and cost.

"We provide complex business processing services to the banking and insurance industries, which demand the highest standards of accuracy. Our processing platforms are built on world-class technology,” said Doug Anderson, IT production director at Xchanging. "BMC Software helps us stay ahead of the IT curve by allowing us to predict and remediate problems before they occur, preventing missed service levels and dramatically reducing the volume of help desk calls. These qualities align perfectly with Xchanging’s strong ethos of superior customer service.”

Configuration Automation provides customers with a unified platform for automating change across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments, including the network. This enables IT organizations to respond quickly to business demands, consistently enforce compliance and improve productivity without additional IT investment.

The newly enhanced BMC BladeLogic Server Automation solution significantly reduces the time and effort required to provision and reconfigure IT resources across physical and virtual environments while eliminating service disruptions and manual configuration errors.

Capacity Optimization leverages predictive technologies and processes to forecast and balance business demand with the supply of IT resources across physical and virtual environments. Based on patented workload modeling and analysis technology, this provides greater visibility into the performance and utilization of an organization’s business service environment -- a necessity for critical IT initiatives such as consolidation and virtualization.

BMC Capacity Management ensures service capacity and performance meet business demand while minimizing the risk of downtime, unnecessary server sprawl and missed service levels. BMC Capacity Management 7.5 adds support for additional Unix and x86 virtualization platforms, including VMware, Microsoft, HP, Solaris and IBM.

"Proactive IT is netting us dramatic cost savings,” said Ron Kaminski, ITS senior consultant at Kimberly Clark. "BMC Capacity Management enables us to quickly identify servers for consolidation and accurately predict future consumption. We are projecting a $3.6 million hardware savings over the next 18 months, and that figure increases significantly when you factor in operational savings from power consumption, cooling and software licenses.”

Operational Support Analytics transforms configuration, performance and dependency data into actionable information enabling IT Operations to make better, fact-based decisions.

The latest release of BMC Atrium solution suite features advanced decision automation capabilities across the BSM platform and a dashboard view of critical IT performance indicators. This gives organizations better insight into how business services are performing, how resources are being utilized and the impact and risk of proposed changes on services.

"As complexity in the data center increases, so does the demand from customers for a holistic management approach that prevents outages and eliminates the costly and error-prone practice of ‘fire fighting’,” said Paul Avenant, vice president of products for BMC’s Enterprise Service Management business unit. "Unlike competing platforms which take a product-centric and reactive approach to problem resolution, BMC is applying next-generation technology along with best practices – gleaned from years of working closely with our customers – to help organizations achieve proactive IT operations quickly and cost effectively.”

Additional Resources

To learn more about how BMC is working with partners and customers to enable proactive IT operations, please read today’s press release titled, BMC Software, Strategic Partners Drive Customers Toward Proactive IT Operations.

For more information on the product enhancements that are driving the shift to proactive IT operations, please read today’s press release titled, BMC Software Announces New Product Releases that Deliver BSM for Proactive Operations.

For more information on the products referenced in this announcement, please visit the following links:

BMC Event and Impact Management

BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management

BMC BladeLogic Server Automation

BMC Capacity Management

BMC Atrium

Business runs on IT. IT runs on BMC Software.

Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across both distributed and mainframe environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2009, BMC revenue was approximately $1.88 billion. Visit www.bmc.com for more information.

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