By Dick Stark

Last week RightStar kicked off its first BMC Capacity Optimization (BCO) implementation at a financial services organization where we’ve previously assisted with Remedy on Demand, BladeLogic Service Automation, and ProactiveNet. At the kickoff, I pointed out that with BCO, the organization has all the critical components of BMC’s Cloud Life Cycle Management offering, meaning that it has its own private cloud.  What’s critical in any cloud or datacenter is effective capacity management, and I was very happy to help with this missing link.

At the kickoff, we briefly discussed all the typical reasons why capacity management is so important:

• Need for fast service and optimal performance to support changing business models and new/consolidated data centers
• Keep services performing and available to meet business needs 24×7
• Reduce costs by continuously monitoring, analyzing, planning, and optimizing IT across data centers
• Reduce risk by managing capacity from a business KPI and application perspective

Yet according to the IT VP the real reason for capacity management was to eliminate surprises.  He wanted to avoid having to ask the CIO to write a check for a new disk array, when it wasn’t budgeted until next year.  Also, due to the volatile nature of the financial market, “just-in-time” capacity planning was required.

RightStar’s solution capacity management is BCO, a product that it acquired when it purchased Neptuny in October of 2010. With its lead offering, previously called “Caplan,” Neptuny brought to BMC a solution that could be delivered both as on-premise software, and as a SaaS offering.

Neptuny also brought BMC unique strengths in terms of third-party and BMC data collection leveraging “connector templates” which complement BMC’s existing process-level data collection technology. Neptuny’s agentless “connector templates” can work with a wide variety of already deployed data sources including performance management tools (e.g., BMC ProactiveNet, SCOM), native interfaces and protocols, and custom repositories, as well as CMDB and discovery tools.

Prior to the implementation, I called another BMC BCO customer and discovered that BCO was a terrific product especially its analytics in support of:

• Performance and business/service driver analysis,
• Time forecasting analysis extrapolation between performance and business/service drivers,
• What/if modeling scenarios to predict the impact of change,
• Simulation and best case analysis, and
• Accounting and show-back analysis.

This means that real-time decision making can be meaningfully shared across operations, service desk, IT and executive, and other line of businesses. Such an impressive array of role support is quickly becoming necessary as IT leaders seek to optimize not just single departments within their organization, but the entire enterprise that cuts across IT, business, service provider and partner interdependencies.