BMC is very intelligently piecing things together!

Posted by on 10 Oct 2007 at 07:51 pm | Tagged as: BMC, RealOps, Opsware, BladeLogic, CA, IBM, HP, Symantec, EMC, Peregrine, Remedy, Micromuse, ESM, Opalis, Marimba, iConclude, Emprisa, Voyence, AlterPoint, Intelliden

Remedy then Marimba then their Topology Discovery product (which I’m not sure but may have come from a portion of their Perform acquisition), then RealOps and now Emprisa. Impressive!

BMC has very nicely pieced together a great Data Center Automation or Configuration & Change Management (CCM) offering (depending on how you want to define DCA). Remedy ($350M acquisition in 2002) & Marimba ($240M acquisition in 2004) offer the customer base available for up-sell and the foundation components of process management and system/application configuration/change management. RealOps & Emprisa offer fresh new technologies and approaches. RealOps with innovative process automation and Emprisa with the network (e.g., routers, switch) parallel to Marimba.  A very smart buy here on Emprisa as I’m sure it was a “value” purchase, where AlterPoint & Voyence have more mindshare and customers (e.g., this equals higher buyout cost) – Emprisa probably was behind in capabilities – but not far enough behind where it would matter for the price.

BMC in my eyes is the second to pull together the key components to deliver on the hybrid Data Center Automation vision for Configuration & Change Management.  Hybrid meaning you must have the products to handle the manual processes bundled and integrated with the products that over time will deliver the promise of automating many of those tasks. A key missing link to this was the RealOps solution. Also, having nothing for the unique “network-side” of the world (it’s more then just a cloud) was a big hole that is now filled. The only question I still have outstanding is if Marimba will be strong enough to compete against Opsware (now HP) and whoever buys BladeLogic (who will be expecting a pretty penny to be purchased as I mentioned in my recent Data Center Automation is Hot post). Marimba has historically been dated in capability comparison to Opsware & Bladelogic.

HP was first to pull everything they needed together but at a significant price as they had to purchase Peregrine ($425M) and Opsware ($1.6B) to take the place of their last effort that didn’t mature as they had hoped (e.g., Service Desk (PROLIN acquisition from 1997), Novidigm and Consera).  So while HP has pulled it together a cool $2B, BMC has done it for under $1B.  Considering how big the data center dependent buzz of web 2.0, and virtualization is getting I think that is money very well spent.

IBM, CA and EMC are still missing key components. IBM has the service desk & asset management components from their MRO software acquisition, the dependency discovery & mapping automation with the Collation acquisition. They also have something that may be able to compete against the RealOps (now BMC) or iConclude (now HP) if applied properly. I’m speaking of the former ThinkDynamic acquisitions which was well ahead of it’s time. The only things I see them missing is they for sure have an overly outdated application/system product so they are most likely candidate (a.k.a. have the greatest need) to purchase BladeLogic. They also have a hole in the network side (e.g, AlterPoint, Intelliden or Voyence) of the world as Micromuse didn’t really have anything to handle the network side of CCM.

EMC has it’s toes at the edge of getting into this mix with their acquisitions of nLayers and SMARTS. They have to be very, very tempted to jump in – but in doing so I’m sure they realize they are missing quite a few pieces.  Unless they go grab BladeLogic, Opalis and either Voyence or AlterPoint.  I have to image they really want to with all the data center emphasis in the company around storage management and of course the success and upside of virtualization and VMware.

Same goes with Symantec who has snagged Relicore and now Altiris.  Unfortunately I think they are just to focused on security and aren’t giving the necessary focus & energy to automating the data center. I get the impression the Altiris buy was more for end-point security then application/systems configuration and change management.  It’s to bad, they are so close to being a force to recon with considering all the former Veritas Storage products.  They could really own the data center if they wanted to.  At this point, their best bet to do that would be to go and buy BMC.  This is not to crazy a thought in BMC has a market capitalization about 33% of Symantec’s.  It would be a big bet, but it comes down to how serious are they about owning (or being a big player) in the data center!

While on this topic of making bets, a more likely scenario could be EMC grabbing BMC if they decide they want to rule the data center.  They have all the pieces and BMC is only about 15% of their market cap.  It would provide almost all the missing pieces AND access to legacy data center management capabilities (e.g., mainframe)

Alright, off my soapbox.  It’s just exciting to see all the action within the Configuration & Change Management space, specifically within the Data Center.  So much attention over the past 10 years has been on monitoring (e.g., availability & performance).  The value of automating repetitive change tasks or mundane tasks is tremendous.  And the thought of someday tying all this together – availability/performance to configuration/change equals those utopian dreams of utility, adaptive, on-demand computing!  We are still many moons away from the “lights out data center” being a reality but we must continue to dream.  In the meantime it’s fun to keep speculating on what everyone will do next, just as I started doing a couple months ago in my post Who will become the next big 4 vendor replacing BMC, CA, HP, IBM, oh the fun!