News

BMC initiative joins business and IT

• By Jack Vaughan
• July 8, 2004

Application development projects are too often hindered by resistance to change among system admins, so can you blame the ops folks? The production environment is frail, new software tends to break and the faster you move, the more mistakes seem to happen.

This is the backdrop for some new initiatives from BMC Software. The company is upping its commitment to change and configuration management solutions with the stated goal of closing the gap between the changing needs of the business and the fragile realities of the typical IT environment.

The initiative will combine BMC's agentless Discovery Express, Configuration Discovery and Topology Discovery software for understanding software assets, as well as Remedy Change Management tools and (newly acquired) Marimba configuration automation software, said Harold Goldberg, vice president, worldwide marketing and business strategy for BMC's Remedy operation.

"Change isn't necessarily a bad thing," said Goldberg, "but if it's unmanaged, it's dangerous." Goldberg echoes the words of other industry observers, indicating IT shops too seldom have standard configurations, which increases the fragility of operations. He noted that Remedy's recent addition of the Marimba line helps to improve chances.

The BMC tools feed an underlying configuration management database. Elements of the initiative, which centers on the so-called BMC IT Discovery Suite, will be released in phases, said Goldberg, with the Configuration Discovery portion of the suite coming out this month, followed by the Discovery Express entry and the Topology Discovery portion, which is due in the fall.