Customer Demand for Choice Driving New Era of IT Service Management at BMC Software

BMC Enables Customers to Adapt ITSM to their Specific Needs

Egham September 21, 2010 – To address the rapidly evolving needs of IT Service Management (ITSM) customers, industry leader BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) is launching substantive product enhancements that focus on the most important trend in the ITSM industry today – the ever increasing customer desire to choose the right ITSM option for their particular situation.

While the discussion over delivery models has been an ongoing and important conversation in the ITSM space over the last few years, equally important to customers are standardized processes such as embedded ITIL®-based best practices, full platform integration and enhanced web reporting. BMC has invested in this and other critical ITSM functionality that fulfills over 90 percent of the needs of IT departments out-of-the-box. 

According to Gartner, BMC is the worldwide market leader in the IT Service Desk and Help Desk space. BMC has increased its market share to 36.1 percent in CY 2009, the most recent period of evaluation, based on total software revenue (Source: Gartner, “Market Share: IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2009,” April 2010).

“Pure-play SaaS providers are now having to fight on the turf of the incumbent, rather than the other way around,” says Ben Pring, research vice president, Gartner Research. “The next chapter of the SaaS story will be about the large Tier 1 incumbents determining how they want the evolution of the ‘as a service’ model to develop.”

“The new era of IT service management is about having a full menu of flexible options to meet the needs of your company, whether large or small, expanding or contracting,” said Paul Avenant, BMC’s senior vice president of products and support for Enterprise Service Management. “Our ITSM customers tell us that in addition to on-premise and on-demand delivery models they need the capability to integrate these models with their cloud initiatives in a hybrid environment. Further, the pervasive use of mobile technology among today’s knowledge workers makes mobility options for both their end users and IT staff a key requirement of their ITSM solution. Finally, our customers are continually working to reduce costs through more out-of-the-box functionality and less customisation work.”

BMC provides customers with many options for deploying ITSM solutions, including on-premise, on-demand or various hybrid models. As of this announcement, customer choice-driven enhancements are available for the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, BMC Remedy OnDemand, BMC ServiceDesk on Force.com and BMC Service Desk Express Suite solutions.

“BMC’s Remedy ITSM Suite meets our service and support needs with its holistic, process-driven approach. Through the years, it has also provided us with the flexibility to adapt as we grew,” said Tess DePalma, senior director of IT Service Delivery at Nemours, one of the nation’s largest pediatric health systems. “We do not worry about our investment in the BMC applications. If our needs change, we can customise or enhance the environment accordingly. We’re excited about the roadmap and changes we have seen in the latest version of ITSM and are considering how we can leverage those options in our organisation.”

BMC’s enhanced ITSM offerings provide a choice of basic and comprehensive service support platforms, delivered either on-premise or on-demand, and optimises service support across the following four areas:

- Service Desk Optimization — Standardise, consolidate, and simplify support operations

- Service Catalog and Request Management — Maintain a catalogue of services to streamline requests and improve demand planning

- Service Asset Lifecycle — Manage cost, improve utilisation, and comply with internal and external configuration and usage policie

- Comprehensive Change and Release Management — Plan and manage all changes according to standards

Specific customer and industry product enhancements include:

- Out-of-the-box templates for cloud lifecycle management

- Ad-hoc web reporting

- Dynamic homepage UI with fly-out menus and people management console

- Decommission scheduler for virtual machines

- Upgrade wizard for managing software licenses

While BMC has been the ITSM market leader for many years, the company’s recently-released SaaS products are quickly gaining popularity.

“We chose BMC Remedy OnDemand for our service desk solution because it’s a low-cost alternative to the traditional on-premise solution,” said Jim Caldwell, director, Infrastructure Services at Shopzilla, Inc. “There is no trade-off in functionality and its service desk solution comes with twenty years of best practices as well as a roadmap that anticipates my future needs.”