Stop Walking in the Dark

Chip Salyards, VP, Asia Pacifc of BMC Software in a conversation with Vinita Gupta speaks about the importance of Business Services Management and BMC’s plans to augment its portfolio in India.

Q:Business Service Management (BSM) is described as the ability to see and use technology infrastructure from a business perspective rather than just capability tools. How would you expand on this basic defnition from a CIO’s perspective?

A: In any IT environment, incidents are an everyday affair. Even in organisations where IT is at a high maturity level, these are common. They happen in many degrees of severity, but no matter how minor, incidents can impact business through sever service disruptions if they are not quickly intercepted and resolved.

CIOs have now realised the need for a proactive approach to IT management and thus are adopting best practices frameworks, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). IT is making signifcant progress in anticipating and meeting the needs of the business, becoming more integrated with business in the process. Business Service Management (BSM) is concerned with IT Service Management, helping organisations monitor IT infrastructure and services from a business perspective. BSM offers a
comprehensive approach and unifed platform that helps IT organisations cut cost, reduce risk, and increase proftability. BSM ensures that IT adds value to the business and doesn’t exist just as a cost centre.

Q:According to CIOs, BSM tools solve only an isolated part of their planning and management puzzle, and thus they fail to address business and IT complexities. How would you counter this argument?

A: In today's environment, CIOs have to do more with existing assets and make sure new IT investments are benefcial. Managing various param eters of the IT environment effciently and effectively are essential steps in doing that, because without proper management and visibility, you may fnd yourself walking in the dark. Many customers and, more specifcally, CIOs I personally speak to, recognise this.

Q:Is there any example (global or India-specifc) that comes to your mind when it comes to implementing business service management?

A: Tata Motors Limited (TML), one of India’s largest automobile companies, adopted BMC’s Remedy IT Service Management Suite to establish a baseline of the IT application and infrastructure landscape across all technol ogy pillars. BMC applications served as the software framework for managing the interactions and process relationships among all the support groups managing the IT infrastructure underlying business services.

BSM tools also played a key role in the rollout of Tata’s ambitious small car ‘Nano’ by helping to track and control all components of IT services and automating the management of the IT infrastructure, which was vital to the designing and planning of the plants that manufactured Nano as well as running day-to-day business processes. IT helped the company shrink its design cycle time.

Q:BMC recently launched the BMC Remedy ITSM Suite ‘On Demand’ solution. How will it help enterprises in adding new IT services and expedite the restoration of service in case of an incident?

A: BMC is applying next-generation technology along with best practices to help organisations achieve proactive IT operations quickly and cost effectively. With products such as BMC Event and Impact Management and BladeLogic Server Automation, Network Automation and Client Automation, we will provide an integrated solution that helps organisations simplify, predict and automate IT.

Q:Early this year, CA bought Oblicore, a company whose software helps users monitor and manage their service level agreements across their IT infrastructures. Analysts see CA making a very clever acquisition with Oblicore; one that puts them a step ahead of their competition in cloud management and BSM. How do you view it?

A: CA customers are now going to be challenged with both service-level reporting and service catalog functionality from disparate products that are each built upon different architectures. This is an inherent faw with the CA strategy of ‘design by acquisition’. In comparison, BMC's strategy is ‘design from the ground up’ for BSM as well as for cloud computing. BMC pioneered the concept of BSM and has designed its products from the very beginning to work across disparate environments. For example, BMC’s SLM product provides customers the ability to track, measure and manage service levels in real time in an on-premise, virtual or cloud environments.

BMC is focused on helping organisations evolve from the classic onpremise IT infrastructure to virtualized datacenters, then to private cloud environments and ultimately hybrid clouds,which combine private clouds and public cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Q:What are the recent client wins and future plans of BMC Software?

A: BMC Software has grown over 30 percent in the Indian market and has bagged around 22 new clients. This growth is due to the increase in the adoption of BSM services by Indian enterprises to solve complex IT problems. BMC APAC derives 20 percent of its revenues from BMC India.

BMC currently has more than 50 satisfed customers in India. Our clientele includes giants such as IDEA Cellular, Bharti-Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Tata Communications, Tata Motors, Reliance Communications, and Sahara. Some of the major deals for BMC in 2009 were: HCL – Xerox, TCL, platform deals at Wipro, TCS, Nokia, Siemens Network, BSNL, Tata Communications and Indus Technologies.

—vinita.gupta@9dot9.in

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