BMC drives service management

In an attempt to make up ground on large systems-management vendors pushing utility computing, BMC Software is opting to map infrastructure elements in terms of impact on business services.

This week BMC will unveil SIM (Service Impact Manager), a new product that fuses service modeling capabilities with enterprise event management, automation, and notification tools to manage availability and performance data of IT operations.

SIM supports BMC’s business management strategy by utilizing visualization techniques to determine the impacts of failures, and conduct root cause analysis on services to drive automation and remediation, said Mark Levy, director of product management at Houston-based BMC’s Service Management Solutions.

Additionally, the product integrates with Remedy for trouble ticket and incident management responses to boost help desk effectiveness.

SIM features a bidirectional interface with BMC’s Patrol for Enterprise Manager, which allows it to sit on top of an existing event management system, including Tivoli, Levy noted.

The product runs on Microsoft Windows, Sun Solaris, AIX, and Linux platforms.

SIM is the first product integration from BMC’s acquisition of IT Masters. Coupled with its purchase of Remedy, BMC has strung together a “very convincing” short-term delivery of business service management moxie, said Tim Grieser, an analyst at IDC in Framingham, Mass.

To keep pace with utility datacenter and adaptive enterprise moves using hardware and supporting software by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, BMC needs to “get their story and positioning correct in this kind of environment,” Grieser remarked.

However, BMC’s BSM technology has the potential to address the onset of cost management and cost services, which are expected to become major issues for customers, Grieser said.