By Dick Stark

BMC’s annual user group conference, Engage, wound down last Friday in Las Vegas. Attendance was up this year by 15% with more than 2000 customers, partners, and BMC employees in attendance. Nancy Donnelly and I presented: Remedyforce, FootPrints, and Remedy, Moving from Survivors to Thrivers. Here is a short Engage 2015 update.

The champagne corks were popping as BMC touted the newly released ITSSM Gartner Magic Quadrant in which they received improved scores related to technology, vision, and strategy relative to SNOW. What’s even more remarkable is that this evaluation pitted Remedy v8, not v9, against SNOW’s latest version. Significant new BMC announcements around its new Digital Enterprise Management Architecture (DEM) included:

• MyIT ServiceBroker, a storefront for any employee or customer facing on-premise or cloud services.
• BMC HR, a comprehensive HR app with an extensive mobile component.
• TrueSight Pulse/Intelligence, another new tool that gives instant performance statistics for websites.

Deloitte and DISA won the Customer Success Story of the year for excellence with ITSM and BladeLogic Server Automation (along with closed loop change management).

RightStar customer Subway presented a session entitled, Subway Supports More than 40,000 Stores Using BMC FootPrints Service Core and BMC Client Management. Subway is up to 44,210 stores now and opening 50-100 every week. In his presentation, subway called out RightStar three separate times, praising our technical expertise and support.

Nancy on Stage at Engage

More than 50 people turned out for our presentation on IT value. We surveyed our customers and reported on the real and perceived value they receive from their ITSM systems and processes. RightStar’s mission is to be our customers’ expert advisor in the ITSM space and return value to their organizations; it is good to know that most of our surveyed customers care about improving customer satisfaction and value.

Everyone I talked to agreed that BMC has come a long way in a year and that Engage 15 was well worth the time and money. The sessions, networking, venue, food, and venue were all excellent. I look forward to Engage 16 next September 6-9, again in Las Vegas.