BMC Software Extends Proactive Operations to the Cloud

* Features better enterprise management with seamless transitioning to virtualization and cloud computing, on a single Proactive Operations platform
* Achieve early, fast and intelligent problem detection, repair and avoidance with predictive analytics driving preventative automation
* Drive IT service performance while optimizing IT spending with business-aware capacity optimization

LAS VEGAS, Gartner Data Center Conference - Today, BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) announced significant new capabilities including the enablement of the cloud-ready Proactive Operations solution for the modern data center, built on a single, unified Business Service Management (BSM) platform for managing physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. BMC now enables a Proactive IT Operations management approach that couples planning, predictive analytics and preventative automation. This allows IT to increase responsiveness to business demand, while eliminating costly and risky reactive processes.
As organizations adopt virtualization and cloud technologies in their hybrid data centers, they’re seeing significantly increased complexity, an explosion of resources and users to manage and significant increase in the volume of changes required. Without a transformative approach to proactively managing IT operations, organizations will not be able to improve service quality and cost management. Instead, IT will spend more time reacting to costly outages, have less visibility into their complex infrastructure and thus be unable to deliver reliable and cost-effective service to the business.

“HCL Technologies, a global service provider, uses BMC’s solution to proactively manage the performance of our huge network of physical and virtual servers in a hybrid cloud environment,” said Kalyan Kumar B, associate vice president and worldwide head of Cross Functional Services for HCL’s Infrastructure Services Division. “By integrating BMC’s proven monitoring tools into a single Proactive Operations platform, HCL has achieved new levels of efficiency and productivity, reducing the number of events flowing to its command center by 50 percent.”

With the BSM for Proactive Operations solution, IT organizations can now simplify the monitoring and management of their data center with a single Proactive Operations platform, combining performance, availability, event and impact management of physical, virtual and cloud environments. Through a unique combination of predictive and service impact analytics, the solution’s proactive impact management delivers early, fast and intelligent problem detection, prioritization and resolution. In addition, the solution accelerates problem isolation and resolution through immediate assessment of change impact on service models and service performance, as well as proactive end-user monitoring that triggers deep application diagnostics. Business-aware capacity optimization that leverages performance and configuration data within the BSM platform extends BMC’s ability to support cloud planning as well as continuous capacity optimization in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.

Updates to the BSM for Proactive Operations solution include enhancements to the following BMC products:
· BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management
· BMC Capacity Management
· BMC Atrium CMDB
· BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping

The BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution provides IT organizations with up-to-the minute system performance and availability information to:
· Anticipate a system slowdown;
· Immediately assess its root cause;
· Determine impact on critical business services; and
· Drive automated change processes to avoid potential outages.

This allows the data center to become a vital, active contributor to the business and a foundation for improved profitability.

“Predictive, proactive and preventative service management is a critical component of our Dynamic Business Service Management approach for helping IT deliver business value at optimal cost,” said Ajay Singh, vice president and general manager of Service Assurance, BMC Software. “By providing customers with a single solution for managing a hybrid environment, we are making the ever-more complex IT environment easier to manage, while simultaneously ensuring that customers can continue to deliver against critical service level agreements.”

With the new product capabilities, configuration changes are reflected immediately in real-time service models and reconciled with the BMC Atrium CMDB. Configuration change information from the BMC BladeLogic Server Automation suite (or from a change management system) is used by the predictive analytics engine to assess the impact of configuration changes on ongoing service performance. Operators can therefore quickly determine if a performance issue was caused by a recent change, and initiate automated roll-back of any misconfigurations or mistaken changes.

In a cloud environment, proactively detecting slow-downs in end-user response times and understanding the cause of the slow-downs is vital to meeting service levels and ensuring customer satisfaction. The new release of the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution addresses this issue by automatically mapping end-user and application transactions to errors in the application code causing slow end-user response times. This results in accelerated application problem resolution through automated root cause analysis and elimination of the need to reproduce application problems.

Logica Australia, a leading IT and business services provider, uses BMC’s solution for remote monitoring of its managed service clients.

“With the dynamic baselining in BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, transitioning clients to our monitoring service is fast and easy, which keeps transition and ongoing administrative costs low,” said David Grima, managed services practice leader, Logica. “The automated root cause analysis further enables us to focus more of our IT staff on improving and expanding our services. By leveraging simple service models, we can align our services to contractual commitments.”

In the latest release of the BMC Capacity Management solution, BMC’s October acquisition of Neptuny is now more tightly integrated with BMC’s BSM platform; leveraging performance and configuration item (CI) data from the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management and BMC Atrium solutions. The addition of business-aware capacity planning that spans servers, storage, applications, network and facilities extends BMC’s ability to support cloud planning as well as continuous capacity optimization in virtual and cloud environments.

“An IT infrastructure is often complex and constantly changing, and virtualized and cloud infrastructures only serve to exacerbate the problem. There is much at stake in keeping infrastructure operational, just as there is in business operations,” said David Williams, research vice president, Gartner, Inc. “The tools and best practices used to keep the infrastructure up and running will play a role in business-oriented pattern detection and enable companies to better anticipate and meet the needs for their data center.”

BMC also provides a robust set of consulting, education and support services to assist customers in defining, implementing, and operating their Proactive Operations initiatives. With in-person workshops designed to analyze current operational processes and tools, clearly define a desired state for the future, and identify gaps BMC Consulting Services helps IT organizations develop a detailed, phased roadmap to utilize the Proactive Operations approach.

Learn more about BMC’s BSM for Proactive Operations at Gartner Data Center December 6-8 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The BMC booth is in the Forum Ballroom - Booth W.

About the Gartner Data Center Conference 2010
The Gartner Data Center Conference is the most comprehensive compilation of sessions and advice on the future of the data center ever held. It offers the latest actionable insights and best practices in all areas affecting the data center – real-time infrastructure to servers and storage to business continuity and disaster recovery. Additional information is available at www.gartner.com/us/datacenter.

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business thrives when IT runs smarter, faster and stronger. That’s why the most demanding IT organizations in the world rely on BMC Software across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. Recognized as the leader in Business Service Management, BMC offers a comprehensive approach and unified platform that helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce risk and drive business profit. For the four fiscal quarters ended September 30, 2010, BMC revenue was approximately $1.96 billion.