ITWeb (Johannesburg)
Carel Alberts, Itweb Technology Editor
14 January 2004
Johannesburg — BMC Software, represented in SA by African Legend Indigo (ALI), is in SA to spread the word about its business service management (BSM) offering, and to investigate possible African expansion. BSM provides "technology-independent views of business services".
The vendor's portfolio monitors the long-term health of business services, manages changes in infrastructure - in terms of business needs, predicts the impact of large business changes such as mergers, guarantees secure access and prioritises responses.
The software set also includes change, configuration and asset management from Remedy, which it bought from Peregrine.
Remedy SEMEA regional manager Roberto Casetta says Remedy and BMC leverage off each other's customer bases, which are largely separate the world over. There are 100 existing SA customers between the two, with "not a lot of overlap".
But is BSM real?
Alan Smith, BMC VP (UK, SA and Israel), says outsourcers such as EDS and CSC saw the value of BSM early on. "They understood that measuring the service, not the technology, enables you to determine whether a failure actually affects the business, for example. It adds prioritisation into the traditional infrastructure management mix."
Meanwhile, the uptake has spread, mostly to banks and telcos. "SA organisations are en route to accepting this," says Smith. He adds that BSM has good value since it delivers business views rather than technological perspectives, and allows prioritisation of actions.
Channel allure
In its domestic and European regions, BMC mixes direct sales with the channel. In SA, it works solely via ALI, its master distributor, to which it has seconded some staff. Its income from SA, which in part goes to partners, is about $10 million.
BMC has a global alliance with Accenture and has global deals with some companies present in SA. Although this allows for global deployment, services would be delivered locally, and since BMC wants to extend its reach into Africa, it needs more partners. Van Stek says the average deal with customers may range from $100 000 to millions of dollars.
Growth forecasts
The forecasts for systems infrastructure services - a term coined by the International Data Corporation - is put at 17% over the next year, which Van Stek and Smith believe to be "a bit optimistic".
"There are countries in Africa one does not want to be in yet," says Smith. "But the growth overall in emerging markets is good."
BMC plays in the same area as HP (OpenView), IBM (Tivoli) and CA (Unicenter TNG). To a certain degree, its manager-of-managers product also goes head-to-head with Micromuse (NetCool), says Smith. Its suite also manages all databases, he claims. Its total portfolio covers enterprise data management, enterprise systems management, Remedy and security administration.
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