By Dick Stark

BMC Discovery, formerly ADDM, continues to be one of BMC’s hottest software products. And for RightStar things are starting to heat up. We just received an order for new Discovery services which we will begin next week. Additionally, we just learned that BMC Discovery beat a competitive discovery tool in a proof of concept with a large municipality. That City has been a long time RightStar SDE account and is now considering a move to either Remedy or a competitive product, and a Discovery win is a strategic first step.

At the City, the priority for discovery overshadowed the need for new service desk software. Why? Because of an upcoming data center move and unplanned outages. So, how did BMC Discovery win? BMC set up the POC using real customer data. BMC has a more extensible library (by a factor of two), and uses a “start anywhere,” application mapping methodology, as opposed to the competition’s top down approach. A top down approach means the scan will just stop at a point due for example, to lack of credentials, and remain incomplete, leaving out valuable information. This gave BMC an impressive speed and scalability edge.

Interest in BMC Discovery remains high thanks to the growing complexity of the IT infrastructure like the cloud (multi-cloud and hybrid), and third platforms (social, mobile, IoT, and analytics). These third platform technologies often put undue stress on IT support groups. As a result, IT analysts often have little or no visibility into root cause analysis and cross dependencies, often hindering IT operational performance. BMC Discovery enables IT departments to better understand “how the pieces fit together,” to discover datacenter inventory, and configuration information and map business applications to underlying infrastructure.

At a RightStar government customer where we are now supporting Remedy, a former Lockheed employee had this to say in a technical brief about DTRA’s Discovery implementation, “BMC Discovery not only shows you the network you know: servers, network gear, even printers and storage. It also shows you your network’s secret life by mapping out communication patterns and groupings you never knew existed. These relationships can be invaluable in an operational environment for operational impact and configuration management.”

At a RightStar government intelligence customer where we have worked with BMC Discovery for more than five years, we are providing value in software license management and discovery. Microsoft’s licensing rules for SQL are so complex that by using BMC Discovery we can help ferret out the CPU Cores for the VM and the CPU Cores for the ESX/ESXi hosts to determine which is the best way to save money on licensing. We also help determine which PCs can handle an upgrade to Windows 10.

What’s even more impressive is the new Discovery features and upcoming enhancements. BMC Discovery as a Service will soon be available, and coming later this summer is public and multi-cloud awareness. Since most organizations now have a mix of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions like Azure and Amazon, BMC Discovery will soon offer the ability to scan all environments, from a “single pane of glass.” This makes BMC Discovery uniquely positioned to help IT win by achieving the full benefits of multi-cloud ecosystems with its industry-leading, vendor agnostic discovery and dependency mapping solution.