Interview: BMC chases framework utopia

If you’re an enterprise infrastructure vendor, it’s all about building a framework. As lines blur between application management and middleware integration, companies such as BMC Software are attempting to clarify their mission. BMC’s strategy is defined by the Business Service Management (BSM) moniker, a mechanism for connecting business decisions and infrastructure. At the tactical level, BMC on Monday released Patrol Express, a “lightweight” addition to its management offerings. BMC’s CEO Bob Beauchamp spoke with InfoWorld Executive News Editor Mark Jones and Senior Writer Scott Tyler Shafer about how such products tie into the company’s framework vision.

InfoWorld: BMC has a number of product lines and capabilities, from enterprise management consoles to mainframe monitors, storage technologies, security administration, and job scheduling. It sounds like you’re spread pretty thin.

Beauchamp: No, in reality what we are is extremely focused. We really have a very tight, narrow product line. We don’t have applications, we don’t sell development tools, we don’t sell testing tools. We’re just really into ensuring business availability, keeping the systems up and running.

InfoWorld: How much of your BSM strategy is just packaging, or is there a unifying technology?

Beauchamp:  It is a best-practices architecture, where you buy individual components and you plug them in and they begin to work together. There is no BMC management framework [or] BMC object management that you have to acquire to make it work.  At its core you’ve got an event management, which is primarily [Patrol] in our Mainview product line; if you’re using a mainframe, you’ll want to use Mainview as well.  In the center for the service desk and service management and [outfit] management, you’ve got the Remedy product line. And then at the top level, where you have the service model and the console architecture around it, you have the IT Masters enterprise console architecture.

InfoWorld: Companies such as Siebel and SAP have become well known for cross-platform integration architectures. How do you differentiate your offering?

Beauchamp:  The whole concept behind business service management is that it’s just not going to scale. Basically it’s time for enterprise management to dramatically simplify, to become much easier, much more consistent, much more automated, much less customized, and take the customer out of being this giant integrator of apps. That’s really what we’re talking about. We’re focusing on managing all the IT infrastructure and all the IT — the systems and processes underneath the technology that support the enterprise.

InfoWorld: You seem to have reduced your focus on storage. Where does storage fit into this picture of managing the IT infrastructure?

Beauchamp: The only thing we announced a reduction in our investment on was in one product: Patrol for Storage Resource Manager. That product was really involved in provisioning storage and we just exited that market. We still have a robust set of storage event management products through the entire Patrol product line. [We have] literally well over a dozen storage management products inside the portfolio. What we got out of was the storage resource management and provisioning business because it was very fragmented, there were too many companies in the business.  It’d be better for us to just integrate with those companies and let that market settle down. But we in no way exited storage as a platform.

InfoWorld: But isn’t provisioning also part of automation? In order to respond to the needs of applications, isn’t that going to require some auto provisioning?

Beauchamp: It’s not that it wouldn’t make sense, we liked it to begin with. The point is that there are lots and lots of provisioning technologies beginning to proliferate out there that are all narrowly focused. They’re focused on provisioning storage or provisioning network bandwidth or provisioning storage capacity. It’s going to get more complex as you start talking about on-demand and utility-based computing and virtualization. What we’re going to do is raise above that, provide the basic infrastructure for notification of the need to provision. [We will] find the problem and notify the provisioning utilities that are available in the market to actually do the low-level provisioning. 

InfoWorld: So you’re not ruling out the possibility of getting back into storage provisioning if things settle down? 

Beauchamp:  I’m not saying that we’ve exited the provisioning business forever. [But] I think in the storage provisioning business right now, until further notice, we’re going to go with partnerships instead.

InfoWorld: There has been speculation about BMC selling off those assets. Is that something you are pursuing?

Beauchamp: I don’t want to talk about mergers, acquisitions, or divestitures until I have something to talk about.

InfoWorld: Provisioning and scheduling arguably could go hand in hand. We’ve talked to IBM before the role of scheduling in what’s generally known as grid computing.  What’s your role in that space, given that as time goes on there’s no reason why companies such as IBM can’t get a handle on the low-level provisioning you are talking about?

Beauchamp:  IBM can do whatever IBM wants to; they’re a big company. The fact is we have the best enterprise scheduling technology in the world. Grid computing is an interesting thing; we’re keeping a close eye on it. We’ve had some of our top technical people involved in working with other organizations looking at it and we’re keeping our options open in that area.  It’s not clear to me that grid computing is going to have a significant impact on IT spending behavior in the next 12 months. Beyond that, I think it’s entirely possibly that it could start getting very interesting, and we’ll be there to [catch] it if that market really does take off.

InfoWorld: BMC has been known for its application centricity. What is the company’s strategic direction for that space?

Beauchamp: BMC is the No. 1 manager of enterprise apps. We manage more SAP, PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards … and Siebel, and it is a very, very strong market for us. We were just over at the Siebel [user] conference [and] Siebel had selected BMC last year as THE — with a capital T — enterprise management partner. I think we’re still the only enterprise management vendor that [has] Oracle’s highest level partnership called [CAP] that has to be approved by the senior management at Oracle. So it’s a strong market force and it’s a key part of being able to manage the whole stack. We want to be able to manage from the widget all the way down in the engine room, up through the middleware, up through the database, up through the app, up to the business service itself — whatever it is that you define the business service.

InfoWorld: How is BMC developing management consoles that increasingly have to deal with very complex, distributed application environments?

Beauchamp:  It really is an exciting shift for an enterprise management vendor like BMC.  It means that we need to be able to dynamically maintain the service model, dynamically maintain the reconfiguration of the underlying infrastructure. You’ve got to be able also [to] detect, in a virtualized environment or a grid environment, changes to the underlying IT infrastructure. [If] someone changes and reconfigures the servers and moves the workload from one server to another, you need to be able to track that if you’re going to maintain the service model.

InfoWorld: What’s the role of Web services in that scenario?

Beauchamp:  I always try to answer that question in two parts. One, it is a way for us to develop and deploy our products more expansively and faster, lighter weight. We’ve come out recently with agentless versions of Patrol and agentless versions of our security administration product. But the other angle, the angle that I think you’re coming from, is to the extent that Web services are for practical purposes yet another layer of infrastructure that needs to be managed. So we need to be able to monitor what’s going on with Web services, track any problems related to the Web services that’s being provided, and manage Web services.

InfoWorld: We’ve seen a bunch of startups in the Web services management space emerging to tackle that problem. Are you looking at those companies?

Beauchamp:  We have our own development under way and our own product lines out there right now, but we have a group that’s always out there doing forward-sweeping radar, looking for interesting acquisition opportunities. Obviously, we’re not afraid to do acquisitions when we find those that we get excited about.