BMC Exchange 2018 NYC – Poised to Disrupt!

By Rich Ptak

Courtesy of BMC Software, Inc.

In mid-October, BMC held its globe-trotting Exchange 2018 event in New York City in the mid-Manhattan 415 Building. BMC’s management team has assembled detailed strategy and implementation plans in support of an ambitious mission. Succinctly stated BMC says: “Our mission is to support our clients in disrupting their industries!” 

BMC will grow market share and increase penetration by facilitating and speeding client efforts to transition to market disrupting, leading edge digital enterprises. A challenging task for both BMC and their clients. BMC outlined in considerable detail their plans for solutions and services to accomplish this mission. We provide our opinion along with some details on what and how they intend to pull it off.  

What’s the task?

BMC will provide solutions, software and services that accelerate client efforts to transform themselves into digital enterprises. To successfully attract and serve customers better than the competition, BMC enterprise clients must become expansively digital in nature, operations and offerings to customers. This means the client and BMC must be able to quickly respond to a customer’s needs and demands. It requires identifying how to satisfy customers in a globally competitive market. A market unsettled by rapid evolution, unforeseen expansion, vulnerable to disruptions. It means delivering ever higher-quality, secure, modular, innovative services that scale.


BMC’s success depends on their ability to deliver products and services that will enable clients to effectively exploit digital technologies. Clients must be able to apply those assets to anticipate and deliver what will satisfy market expectations and demands. Key to BMC’s success is driving optimization in cloud migration and management, mainframe automation and management, along with continued innovations in service management, security and operations.


BMC’s strategy and solution plan

BMC’s strategy is to leverage existing and emerging technologies (cloud, AI/ML/cognitive, DevOps, automation, etc.) to provide integrated, innovative solutions, not simply tools, toolkits or point services. The solutions will include any or all of these to leverage existing and emerging technologies to deal with:

1. An escalating frequency and speed of change, 
2. Extreme agility when responding to evolving market conditions and customer demands,
3. The need to continuously evolve and deliver operational efficiencies in solution delivery.

Also key is having a dynamic enterprise IT operating environment supporting continuous enterprise-wide transformation for fully digitized operations. All while the IT environment is in the midst of a transition to (become) a unified mix of current and quickly evolving IT technologies.

BMC identifies three capabilities essential for a successful transformation (Figure 1). These are:

1. Automate – the ability to run anywhere, turn escalating amounts of data into real insights and ensure rapid application modernization.
2. Service – oriented to support discovery everywhere, built on cognitive (AI) technology-based services, operating in any cloud environment and delivering integrated, consistent and coherent experience to any channel. 
3. Operate – with transparent, reliable, expansive performance monitoring, fully compliant to satisfy agreed upon/mandated levels of protection, security, risk and reliability managed by policies that optimize cost and capacity.

To make all this happen, BMC offers competitive leadership and differentiation in four areas:

• 

  Image courtesy BMC Software, Inc.

  Figure 1 Capabilities needed to transform to a Digital Enterprise

  Cloud support – the de facto standard for enterprise IT architectures, BMC can provide solutions to operate and optimize in multi-, mixed-, public, private, on- and off-prem environments.
• DevOps enablement – facilitate and enhance DevOps with modern tools that will speed and simplify application development and delivery. 
• Cognitive solutions (AI/ML) – from cloud-based intelligent service desk to automated asset discovery to the self-managing mainframe driven by machine learning and built-in domain expertise and, BMC’s cognitive solutions enable greater efficiency, security and competitive advantage.
• Security – an escalating threat of sophisticated, “bad actor” attacks on data along with the associated financial and operational risk will be addressed through intelligent, automated approaches to anticipate, avoid and mitigate their impact across the enterprise. BMC’s recent acquisition of CorreLog further solidifies their position as a leader in the Security arena.

BMC plans to support these efforts with comprehensive consulting services to help their clients plan and drive their transformation to digital enterprises. To that end they have expanded the staffing and portfolio of services to plan for and deliver consulting to implement transformation. This is an area of increasingly vital interest to and competition in today’s market. It is worth a look by any enterprise currently contemplating or even undergoing transformation.

There is much more to the range of services BMC is committed to provide. We’ll tantalize with a referral to one more announcement, BMC AMI, Automated Mainframe Intelligence solutions.

BMC AMI – the self-managing mainframe
BMC recognizes the de facto enterprise IT environment as increasingly cloud-based (hybrid, multi-, mixed, public, private, etc.), dominated by standards, passionately secure, protected and optimized. A fully modernized mainframe with comprehensive security, services and contemporary DevOps tools will continue to play a critical and significant role in enterprise IT.


To that end, BMC Automated Mainframe Intelligence (BMC AMI) anticipates the emerging era of the self-managing mainframe. BMC AMI promises intelligent automation driven by domain expertise and real-time predictive analytics will help clients anticipate and avoid operational problems. DevOps will continue modernization to extend beyond the latest tools and processes that speed application development, deployment and operations.

Courtesy BMC Software, Inc.

Figure 2 Powering the Self-Managing Mainframe

Finally, BMC AMI Enterprise Connectors will enable real-time streaming of the vast, disparate collection of data types, formats, structures of log, operational data, etc. to the range of data analysis solutions, such as Splunk, ArchSight, QRadar, etc. See Figure 2.

Conclusion

BMC’s strategy and plans are aggressive and impressively ambitious. They take seriously the belief that enterprise “disrupters” will dominate the future. Their commitment to facilitate and speed disruption is being delivered in a world-wide tour of BMC Exchange 2018 which continues into 2019. Setting high expectations, BMC faces no easy task to deliver. Success depends upon extraordinary focus, impeccable execution and clear, abundant proof of repeated successes with client transformations.

In the past, BMC has delivered innovative solutions, but often without necessarily getting the credit (or revenue) they deserved for such leadership. That must change. They are not alone in identifying and focusing on the principal technology areas where they claim differentiation.  All targeted areas, e.g. Cloud, AI/ML, intelligent automation, etc. are hot, highly competitive areas.

In addition to delivering on the services and intelligent, automated and broadly integrated solutions, BMC must prove its ability to deliver and drive the innovative differentiation that is the basis of significant success for “disruptive” clients.

BMC did provide an ambitious vision of differentiated product-solutions and services. To realize their goals, they will need to promote and effectively communicate their vision and solutions to a much larger audience than previously. If they execute well, we expect to be writing a good deal more about them. Check them out and let us know what you think.