By Dick Stark

BMC held its annual Public Sector Forum on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Center in Washington DC. Chris Wallace, current host of Fox News Sunday and the afternoon keynote speaker, provided a good change of pace to the Forum agenda. He discussed the current political landscape and was up-to-speed on all the latest political jokes such as, “Did you hear that Obama’s 2005 Chrysler Sedan is being auctioned on eBay?  Runs well, but can’t pass anything.” You had to be there…

If you were there, you would have sat in on the opening speech from BMC President and CEO, Bob Beauchamp. Bob addressed the 650+ attendees by saying that BMC is still doing very very well. BMC’s latest quarter results showed total revenue up 7% giving BMC $2.2B in annual trailing revenue. After 30 years, BMC is now the 8^th largest independent publicly traded software company in the world.  

Bob’s theme that he echoed throughout his talk, was that although IT is undergoing a transformation, so is BMC. He mentioned that the CIO of ExxonMobil was in the BMC visitor center recently and remarked that BMC’s IT management solution provides the foundation required to “change the game” for ExxonMobil.  In other words, the engine room is relevant. With BMC’s “management system for hybrid IT,” ExxonMobil can plug-in or unplug new vendors into this universal management platform (that is now more than BSM).  That’s significant because just several years ago ExxonMobil considered BMC a software tool provider.

Bob then placed three stakes in the ground:

• The traditional data center is dead,
• The PC era is dead (there are now more iPads and Personal Digital Assistants sold than PCs), and
• Traditional expectations of IT are dead.

He continued by saying that while last year was the year of the Cloud, this year it is all about mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) as users now come to work with their own iPads or cell phones.  IT now makes a difference if it can improve end-user productivity. How? Through self-service, availability anywhere/any-time, the right cloud for the mission, and works great all the time.

Next up was a standing room only presentation from BMC executive Doug Mueller, a Remedy co-founder. Doug discussed the new future Remedy versions, and pointed out that Service Request Management is becoming the centerpiece of the Remedy ITSM solution.

Government CIO’s from DHS, NASA, USDA, and the Army discussed cloud computing in the public sector. Cloud computing is becoming pervasive due to the government’s Implement Cloud First policy, FedRamp certification, data center consolidation efforts, emphasis on budget reduction, and focus on procurement improvement.

It was a very good day for both BMC and RightStar. We had excellent exposure from booth traffic and the RightStar logo on all the attendee bags. We also spent good time networking with BMC executives, sales, pre-sales, and professional service employees. It was a terrific way to start 2012!