BMC launches new change, configuration management products

Computerworld - BMC Software Inc. today announced a set of change and configuration management products that will be shipped later this summer and in the fall.
The new Configuration Discovery product is timed to coincide with BMC's acquisition of Marimba Inc. in July, said Harold Goldberg, vice president of BMC marketing.
Configuration Discovery will be part of the new BMC IT Discovery Suite. In addition to Configuration Discovery, which defines how IT assets are configured, BMC will announce two other products this fall, Goldberg said. All three parts of the suite will populate a standards-based Configuration Management Database.
Peter Pace, manager of change management for United.com and related Web sites run by United Air Lines Inc., said he plans to evaluate the new tools further once they are available.
United has used BMC's Change Management 5.0 for more than a year to predict how a system will perform if part of it is taken down for routine maintenance, a common occurrence that caused disruptions in the past. "It's a very flexible and easy-to-use tool, and it automates a lot of our processes," Pace said.
United's adoption of of Change Management, which BMC acquired through the purchase of Remedy nearly two years ago, "is having a positive impact" and has even led to end users praising IT staffers for giving them more control over systems, Pace said. "We're now viewed as an enabler of getting things done," he said.
Remedy is a popular tool that has benefited from coming under the BMC umbrella, Pace said. BMC has promoted the business service management concept, which is helping to raise the prominence of Change Management.
Robert McNeil, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said the new products fit well into BMC's business service management initiative, which he compared to various on-demand strategies offered by competitors Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Tivoli Software and Computer Associates International Inc.
McNeil also predicted that BMC will hold on to the brand name of Remedy, which has won tremendous loyalty from customers in recent years.
To that end, BMC is working with consultants to determine how it will use Remedy and other product names in the future, Goldberg said. There are about 13,000 BMC software customers and another 10,000 Remedy customers, with only a small amount of overlap, he said.
Pricing for the new products hasn't been set.
In other networking and systems management news today:

• Voyence Inc. in Richardson, Texas, announced the general availability of VoyenceControl Version 3.0, a network configuration management product. It includes OS Deployment Manager to centralize control and schedule mass deployments of operating systems across a network. The starting price is $15,995 for 100 devices.


• IBM announced the new IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for Virtualized Data Centers 8.2. The software is designed to centralize, automate and simplify both management and scheduling of batch and real-time applications across heterogeneous computing systems. The single view can be used to manage computing jobs across grid pools of servers, mainframes and server clusters. Pricing starts at $200,000.


• Peribit Networks Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., announced two hardware products and a new version of its software to optimize bandwidth over WANs. The SR-100 Sequence Reducer, available now, offers OC-3 compressed output speeds and serves as a hub that will support up to 2,000 remote SR devices. It starts at $24,000. The SM-500 is the first in a family of Sequence Mirrors to eliminate repetitive data patterns for more efficient IP transmissions. It will start at $9,000 and be available in August. Peribit also announced SRS (Sequence Reducer Software) 5.0, which can automatically install SR and SM hardware, among other features. SRS 5.0 is available now and is free on SR and SM platforms.