Last week I attended a two-day partner summit at BMC headquarters in Houston. RightStar was one of twenty global partners invited, and one of only five based in North America. Not only did I pick up RightStar’s award for Top North American Public Sector Partner, but I picked up a lot of interesting information at the summit.
First of all, BMC is performing very, very well. Bob Beauchamp, President and CEO, reported that ESM revenue (the Service Support, Assurance, and Automation product lines) is up thirty-two percent from the previous quarter. He also said that no BMC product line is up less than twenty-nine percent. It was good to hear Bob say that “BMC can’t hit its sales targets just by hiring direct sales people—partners will play an ever increasing role in overall sales growth.”
I also heard that Business Service Management (BSM) continues to evolve and gain traction. BMC CTO Kia Behnia discussed Dynamic BSM—the concept that, due to the pervasiveness of cloud computing, “one size fits all” BSM no longer applies. It must support virtual environments across internal and external clouds.
Kia used a restaurant analogy to get this concept across. The best restaurants don’t offer a one price, all you can eat buffet. They package their selections into several menu items with different prices and options. Likewise, IT departments must offer different service options through self-service portals and on-demand provisioning with a “pay as you go” pricing model.
Paul Avenant, VP of ESM Products, reported that cloud computing is a top CIO priority and BMC is well positioned in this space. He presented BMC’s cloud strategy as its ability to deliver BMC solutions in a Software-as-a-Service model and provide management software for public, private, and hybrid clouds. BMC now offers Cloud Lifecycle Management for service providers. Paul said that this is the killer application for cloud service providers, as it allows for automatic provisioning, self-service portals, and flexible metering and billing offerings.
Bob Johnson, VP of SaaS, said that according to Gartner, SaaS deals will soon make up around thirty percent of ITSM wins. He described the success BMC has had with Remedy OnDemand and ServiceDesk on Force.com. What’s especially exciting for RightStar (and other partners) is that the onboarding will be subcontracted exclusively through the channel.
Finally, Kathy Bexley, VP of Enablement, described the training options available for partner sales and technical resources. Expect more information soon on the options and technical certifications available from BMC for both online and instructor-led classes.