By Dick Stark

Last Monday, BMC announced its intention to acquire Numara Software, maker of FootPrints and Track-IT! for approximately $300M. This gives BMC a 40% market share in the service management space and provides BMC with a full product offering from the small business to the enterprise. It also gives BMC access to more than 13,000 new customers from which BMC can further accelerate its Service Management SaaS business, primarily Remedyforce, but also Remedy on-Demand (RoD).  This is obviously a good move for BMC, but what does it mean for RightStar and our customers?

Since RightStar’s commercial focus has been the mid-market this acquisition offers us more potential than any other previous BMC acquisition. Charles King, president and principal analyst, Pund-IT described the acquisition this way, “Offhand, I wouldn’t expect much of an effect on BMC’s installed base, though stretching things a bit, it might earn the company some business among its existing customers’ channel partners.  Not sure what the effect might be on Numara’s clients….” So, how specifically can RightStar benefit?

Migration opportunities to Remedyforce.  With the new winter release available soon, Remedyforce is closing in on parity with Remedy on-Demand.  The new release offers an actionable Service Catalog, Service Request Management, with functionally similar to RoD. Additionally, the CMDB now includes the same configuration item classes as RoD.  On Friday, I met with an existing RightStar SDE customer in Manhattan.  They were looking for their first cloud based solution and were very excited about the additional functionality that Remedyforce offered to their service management environment.

FootPrints.  Numara’s FootPrints offers a more complete offering than Service Desk Express, especially for customers that require on-premise and a more standard out-of the box service management work flow. RightStar will move quickly to build its FootPrints sales and implementation expertise.

Training and Consulting.  With three ITIL Service experts, and standardized assessment and training options, RightStar offers an affordable consulting alternative for the mid-market.

Asset Management.  We are already working on MagicWand/ScanStar barcode scanning for Remedyforce, which will provide inventory and reconciliation solutions in a SaaS environment. A ScanStar for FootPrints is another possibility.

Service Assurance and Automation. While these BMC products are targeted more towards, the enterprise, the upper mid-market can benefit with standard integrations between the Remdy-force CMDB and ProactiveNet and BladeLogic, making the entire BSM solution a reality for the upper mid-market.

Score another one for the good guys!  RightStar will move quickly to ramp-up its Remedyforce and FootPrints sales and delivery capabilities.  Whether the need is SaaS or on-premise, RightStar will be well positioned for mid-market success.