By Dick Stark

I attended BMC’s Partner Summit held last week in conjunction with BMC’s sales kickoff. It was a very positive couple of days, not only because RightStar won the BMC Public Sector Partner of the Year award for BMC’s FY12, but because of continued BMC channel improvements.  Here are my takeaways from the meeting.

The ITSM/BSM space is getting more mind share from CIO’s and BMC is positioned very well.  Both CA and HP have not focused as intently in this space allowing BMC to take market share. What’s especially exciting is the impact that BMC’s SaaS based ITSM offering– Remedyforce is starting to have in this market.

BMC is more mid-market focused than ever before. With the acquisition of Numara, BMC has better offerings for customers with less than 10,000 employees. A recent company reorganization has created a new BMC commercial group, headed by the former Numara CEO who now has a  business unit responsible for FootPrints, Track-IT!, and Remedyforce.  His objective is to work direct and with partners to double this business unit in just several years. This bodes very well for RightStar as we are now BMC’s #1 mid-market partner.

BMC Remedy ITSM is getting much better. BMC announced that it had acquired long-time ISV and BMC Technology Alliance partner, Abydos.  This allows BMC to offer Abydos’ designer and analyzer software utilities for all BMC ITSM suite customers. Abydos’ Analyzer offers deployment and upgrades to Remedy, while generating high quality reliable and accurate documentation. Abydos Designer is a modeling tool designed specifically for Remedy applications. It allows requirements gathering, process workshops or best-practice process modeling for Remedy Incident, Problem, Change, and SRM applications with full access to Remedy form structures and field references.  BMC also discussed improvements to ITSM 7.7 around the improved SRM module.

BMC’s technical certification program is announced and ready to roll. RightStar and other partners must now maintain base certification requirements around technical disciplines such as ITSM and Cloud Lifecycle Management.  Consultants may now achieve and maintain appropriate technical certifications as BMC Certified Professionals, Experts, or Architects. This is good for us and RightStar will work hard to ensure that we have plenty of certified consultants