By Dick Stark

BMC’s Exchange, held last Thursday at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, was well attended by more than 250 customers, prospects, and partners. Sessions held all day covered topics such as Cloud, ITSM, Data Center Automation, and Performance and Availability. Here are a few notes from the show.

Paul Avenant, BMC Senior VP and Chief Customer Officer, spoke about life in these interesting times, and discussed a new SMAC—Social, Mobility, Analytics, and Cloud.  Paul said that it is a new digital service world.  Users expect self-service anytime and anywhere.  They are used to mobile apps that have updates monthly instead of yearly.  He pointed out that the users expect a personalized experience from their IT department, similar to what they receive from Google or Amazon.

In regard to mobility, Paul cited a large Bank that has seen a drop in bank transactions of 35%, a drop in ATM transactions of 10%, and an increase in mobile transactions of 400% over the past year. He went on to say the Bank is keeping its branches open more for marketing and community support than anything else. Paul was optimistic about BMC’s direction especially in regard to MyIT, v2.0 and BMC’s new AppZone product, a private application store for organizations to distribute software to its employees.  Paul closed with BMC’s new tagline, “30 Years, One Focus: IT Management.”

Next up was James Staten, VP Cloud Infrastructure and Operations, Forrester Research.  James discussed why and how organizations are adopting the cloud.  He summarized:

Cloud is agility driven, not cost driven. The cloud values autonomy, standardization, automation, and elasticity. For example, RightStar has used Salesforce.com for sales force automation since the company was formed more than 10 years ago.  In that period, we have spent more than $250K on software subscription fees. Had we selected an on-premise software solution, we would likely have spent no more than $50K during that same period.

Yet, Salesforce was the right solution for us due to its ease of use, quick implementation, and integration with other applications.  Most importantly, we are always on the current version, and the software has improved exponentially during that time. Agility, not cost is what matters.

In the age of the customer, drop IT from ITSM and replace with agile. CEO’s expect that CIO’s will simplify IT and mature ITSM is a way to deliver on that objective. The challenge is that IT has moved from becoming a service provider to a service broker, as empowered employees can easily bypass IT and order applications, mobile devices, and disk storage without IT’s knowledge or approval, and expect IT to support everything. James stated that even ITIL has lost its luster, really its customer focus.  In a related survey, James said that organizations that implemented Incident and Change, reported little value from all this effort.

In summary, IT must return to showing value without sacrificing agility or security. Start simply, adapt agile methods—and carefully consider what systems, applications and processes move to the cloud.