At the BMC Public Sector Forum in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, I introduced the afternoon keynote speaker, Willie Geist. Willie is the host of “Way Too Early with Willie Geist” on MSNBC and the co-host of “Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough.” He is also the author of American Freak Show, a hilarious satire about American political and cultural icons like Tiger Woods, Sarah Palin, and Rod Blagojevich.

Willie Geist and Dick Stark at the BMC Public Sector Forum on January 13, 2011

Willie provided a good change of pace on the Forum agenda, which began with a speech from BMC President and CEO, Bob Beauchamp. The main theme of Bob’s speech was about how BMC continues to be on fire. Their latest quarter results showed total revenue up 9% and ESM license revenue up 32% year-over-year. Bob also made hay over the latest Gartner Magic Quadrants for ITSM, where BMC is positioned all alone in the upper-right leaders quadrant, and IT Event Correlation and Analysis (Service Assurance), where BMC is also solidly in the leaders quadrant.

The rest of the morning sessions centered on cloud computing in the public sector. Cloud computing is becoming pervasive due to the government’s Implement Cloud First policy, data center consolidation efforts, emphasis on budget reduction, and focus on procurement improvement.

BMC’s Mark Settle discussed harvesting head count. BMC has studied the work effort among four IT job types: Service Desk (L1), Operations (L2), Engineering (L3), and Architecture (L4). In an ideal environment, only L1 teams do L1 work. Normally, what happens is that L2 teams end up doing some amount of L1 work, and so on, bringing up the overall service management costs. BMC has worked to move the work “down the ladder” by changing, moving, or eliminating the work. They’ve done this by monitoring the right metrics, like the percentage of service tickets properly assigned the first time.

The Forum concluded with a standing room only presentation from BMC executive Doug Mueller, a Remedy co-founder. Doug discussed the new Remedy version 7.6 and above, and his views on ITIL and BSM.

It was a very good day for both BMC and RightStar. There were more than 500 systems integrators, customers, and prospects in attendance. We had excellent exposure from booth traffic, event signage, the afternoon keynote address, and positive remarks from BMC Public Sector VP Ken Mellett. We also spent good time networking with BMC executives, sales, pre-sales, and professional service employees. It was a terrific way to start 2011!