By Dick Stark

BMC’s Exchange 15 held March 19, 2015 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC. The event was well attended by more than 350 customers, prospects, and partners. Sessions throughout the day covered topics such as Cloud, ITSM, Data Center Automation, and Performance and Availability. Here are a few notes from the show.

Paul Appleby, BMC Executive VP, Worldwide Sales and Marketing, spoke about BMC in the 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 government, Paul discussed a cloud first policy, and other important needs such as cybersecurity, efficiency, and ease of doing business. Paul was optimistic about BMC’s direction especially in regard to MyIT, v2.0 and SmartIT which provides a Facebook like intuitive experience. He cited a BMC customer, Vodaphone as an account with more than three million MyIT users.

Next up was the keynote speaker, retired Admiral James Stavridis. He is author of several books and was the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.  He provided a very brief history of the past 100 years and in the end pointed out criticality of improved cybersecurity.

Regarding Cloud First, Stuart Ainsworth, BMC Federal CTO, and Tauf Chowdbury, USDA Architect, discussed transitioning ITSM on-Premise to the Cloud. BMC should soon receive approval from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) to operate Remedy on-Demand (RoD) in the cloud. The USDA sponsored BMC to achieve Authority to Operate (ATO), which authorizes BMC to provide RoD to government agencies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the FedRAMP compliant Cloud Services Provider.  For disaster recovery purposes, RoD is provisioned in two AWS availability zones in the East, which are more than 50 miles apart.

RightStar will exhibit at Engage 15, BMC’s worldwide user conference in Las Vegas in September and I’m looking forward to another excellent show.