BMC Plans BSM Market Push.

BMC Software Inc is planning to ship a three-set configuration discovery suite over the next month that will feed a new configuration management database and link with the vendor's maturing business service management product line.

The new BMC IT Discovery Suite will become available just as the company closes on its proposed $239m acquisition of Marimba Inc, the change and configuration management software supplier. The launch of IT Discovery Suite will effectively bring together a portfolio of change and configuration management programs designed to help customers accelerate implementation of the company's Business Service Management solution set.

BMC has been selling various product components against its BSM vision since mid-2002, but its plan really took shape when it bought service impact modeling specialist IT Masters International SA in March 2003. That added to the Remedy workflow engine acquired from Peregrine Systems Inc, and together the technologies enable administrators to map service levels to the underlying IT assets to build dynamic models that map to the provision of business services.

The ultimate aim of BMC's BSM strategy is to provide tools that feed systems information in real time with a range of service quality measures. The tools will also help flesh out accompanying views of IT resources supporting various business services.

It is proposed that a central configuration management database, or CMDB, becomes the hub and repository of all information gained by all other systems management processes. This central repository allows systems administrators the appropriate access levels to be able to query from a single logical location all relevant information about any configuration item.

The forthcoming product triplet includes Discovery Express, which identifies what components make up a particular IT environment, Configuration Discovery, which defines how those assets are configured, and Topology Discovery, which shows how systems are connected and applications are related. They will all populate an object-oriented, standards-based common CMDB. BMC Software's Service Impact Manager product could then be used to provide one common view of the IT infrastructure.

Once it has finalized the acquisition of Marimba, the technology will provide it with a means of offering policy-based configuration automation software with options for patch management, software distribution and server management, the company said.

BMC has pioneered the idea of business service management, a market which analyst firms such AMR variously size at worth up to $3bn. Earlier this month Hewlett-Packard Co took a significant first step into business service management with the release of OpenView Business Process Insight, a product that is said to be able to quickly model, monitor and manage key business processes to issue alerts to system administrators if a process is about to fail.

Alan Smith the managing director of BMC in Europe said: "BMC was the first vendor to address the BSM market and without a doubt now has the broadest offering." He said product development of the BSM toolkit will continue this year. "Two aspects in particular will drive future developments: the areas of auto-discovery and open portal access, to allow common access point to the service management environments. Otherwise the BSM portfolio is pretty much all there," he said.