At BMC yesterday, you could hear the celebrations and picture the fist pumping and high fives a long way away.  For BMC accomplished something that no one had else ever done: They reached the pinnacle of IT’s holiest of holy places, the upper right corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  And when they looked around, they found their closest competitors, CA, HP, and ServiceNow, lagging behind in the challenger’s quadrant.

Does BMC deserve this higher ranking or has the competition become worse?  And what does this mean for RightStar and other BMC service providers?

The specific quadrant under discussion is the Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk. It focuses on “enterprise-class vendors that address the needs of enterprise customers seeking functionality for incident, problem, change, knowledge, self-service and service-level agreement (SLA) management.”  It does not focus on BMC’s Service Assurance and Service Automation product families.  Nor is this about BMC Service Desk Express. The product line of focus is Remedy ITSM, which has been the market leader in this space for years. 

What makes Remedy so great is that it has evolved from the ground up to an integrated tool set of integrated ITIL modules. (This is in contrast to CA and HP which bought disparate modules and cobbled everything together as a single offering.  The recently released Remedy-on-Demand product line also looks very strong. We kick off our first Remedy on Demand (RoD) job on Monday, but anticipate just the usual glitches and gottchas common to any enterprise software implementation. Expect RoD to give ServiceNow a good fight especially as the product gains install base and user acceptance.  Interestingly, there is still plenty of hope for Remedy on-premise solutions. The Gartner article pointed out that organizations looking to save money using an on-demand solution may actually end up spending more as long as the ITSM solution is in place for more than three years.  Gartner also said to prepare for large increases as on-demand pricing has artificially low pricing to spur demand

While BMC currently sits atop the pyramid, in reality they really aren’t that far ahead of their closest competitors.  But look for more good things to come from BMC as the ITSM market matures.