By Dick Stark

BMC’s Monitor and Operate (aka Service Assurance) product line is one of its fastest growing product areas.  With the recent Coradiant and Neptuny acquisitions, BMC significantly strengthens its offering in the APM and Capacity Optimization spaces. The synergies between Coradiant’s TrueSight technology and BMC’s ProactiveNet Performance Management’s (BPPM’s) behavior learning engine, coupled with the possibility of eventually integrating technology derived from BMC BladeLogic Application Release Automation, will significantly differentiate BMC from its closest Monitor and Operate competitors.

RightStar currently has four on-going Monitor and Operate jobs, all of which center around BMC’s Atrium CMDB/Remedy as the application centerpiece.  For those of you that don’t know, Monitor and Operate make up one-fourth of the BMC “product wheel.” It is a set of products from BMC that provide predictive intelligence for IT operations. According to BMC, this route to value “integrates service impact management with event processing automation to build a service model that maps IT components to the business services they support, consolidates, enriches, and correlates events, and determines root causes and the impact of events on business services.” In other words, BMC Service Assurance helps predict events and automate their resolution before they disrupt the business.

Monitor and Operate is also known as service impact and event management. These products have been around for years—better known by their old name, BMC Patrol. Most companies of more than 2,500 employees already have some form of Service Assurance products, like HP Operations Manager, CA-Spectrum, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft SCOM, or EMC Smarts.

RightStar is authorized to sell and provide L1 support for the entire BMC Monitor and Operate product line, including APM, Capacity Optimization, Enterprise Scheduling, Event and Impact Management, and ProactiveNet Performance Management.

Now that we are BMC Monitor and Operate authorized, and have in-house expertise, how should we sell these product solutions? My view is that we need to offer Monitor and Operate to our existing Remedy customer base.  Accounts like the four previously mentioned are good prospects because they understand the BSM message and the value an integrated Monitor and Operate solution can provide.

As always it will be up to us to sell the value—improved IT efficiency, better root cause analysis, decreased time to repair, reduced service desk volume, and improved customer satisfaction. It is up to us to make sure that all our customers understand how Monitor and Operate fits with their overall event-to-incident/problem resolution processes, including workflow, escalation and integration with service desk tools.