I haven’t had a chance to catch up with him but I am pleased to see a very good friend of mine, Tom Bishop, pitch up at BMC, as CTO. Tom has a brain the size of a planet, his own pilot’s license, plays a mean game of pool with Italian small pockets even at 3am, and he can drink me under the table. Needless to say he’s good company.
Tom will have his work cut out – BMC has made some solid strategic acquisitions but now the firms needs to provide deeper integration between all these properties. The strategic crown jewels at BMC rest in Remedy, which owns the service desk market. While other major vendors talk about federated configuration management database (CMDB), to underpin ITIL-based service management strategies, its Remedy they have to integrate with. Remedy is an enterprise control point, in terms of information for operations management. Remedy also embeds a powerful operations development environment platform in the shape of the Action Response System (ARS)–although its a “non-standard” workflow platform. It needs to be more tightly integrated with Marimba’s provisioning architecture. Then there are BMC’s identity management acquisitions (Calendra, Open Network)…
But i would have to agree with BMC that Atrium CMDB has somewhat of a lead over IBM’s competitive offering. If real code talks then BMC has been gabbing on for over nearly a year. This is not to say IBM’s recently announced change and configuration management database (CCMDB) won’t do well in the market, but BMC does has first mover advantage, with a fully fledged channel ecosystem.
Tom’s job will be to ensure that market momentum is sustained with technical momentum. Strongly in his favor is the fact he is a distributed guy through and through, rather than a mainframe maven, which is where the majority of BMC’s revenues (and in the past, technical leadership) come from. He will be relishing the charge, and BMC developers are likely to respond accordingly. He also knows the competition pretty well; having been on the Tivoli team from 1994 to 1999.
What can we expect in the mid term? If I know Tom, a stronger SOA and web services management vision, for one thing, but also more in the way of server virtualization management. Tom will likely be spending a lot of time in Bangalore.
Anyway–Computerworld appears to have the scoop.
[Note: I would just like to thank Cote for doing such a great job compiling BMC-related links on this feed, so making this roundup so easy]
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