In Part Two of BSMdigest’s exclusive interview, Herb VanHook, Vice President of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC, talks about BMC's latest news and products.
BSM: How do different environments – physical, virtual and cloud – visually appear to the user in your Proactive Operations dashboard?
HVH: One of the great capabilities of BMC Business Service Management products is to focus on the “business service” as the highest-level element of management. These services are composed of lower-level components. These components could be physical resources, virtual resources or cloud resources (depicted as representative icons in the dashboard). Proactive Operations enables systems operators to drill down to the appropriate component level to understand service performance, problems or issues.
BSM: How does your product deliver early warnings on impending problems?
HVH: BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) provides early warning using its predictive analytics capabilities. It does this without relying on static and reactive thresholds. BPPM has a unique base lining capability to learn what “normal” performance looks like and can alert users on performance deviations.
BSM: BMC promises to "eliminate more than 50% of your manual IT processes by harnessing the power of your operational data." How is this done?
HVH: Most organizations have operational data in terms of their IT inventory, performance of their systems and current IT processes. They also have “tribal knowledge” that exists in the heads of their people as to how things in IT get done – i.e. systems deployed, problems debugged. BMC provides solutions that can institutionalize that information and turn it into actionable artifacts – assets, configuration items, compliance procedures, service models and automated processes and workflows. This helps organizations reduce the manual tasking that occurs day-to-day in IT and frees their people to focus on more strategic work.
BSM: Does BMC integrate with open source monitoring tools?
HVH: We have customers today that use open source monitoring tools and have integrated them to BMC solutions. Some examples include using alerts from an open source tool to open a trouble ticket in BMC Remedy ITSM and using alerts to drive automation workflows in BMC Atrium Orchestrator. With a full set of open APIs, integration with BMC solutions is rarely an issue.
BSM: How will the GridApp acquisition impact BMC's BSM solutions?
HVH: The addition of GridApp enables BMC to extend provisioning and configuration capability to databases. GridApp's software includes a workflow engine and expertise to configure DBMSs in single-instance, failover or clustered configurations, which leads to significant labor savings, increased reliability and consistency and improved compliance – all key components of BSM. In cloud environments, customers are requesting support across the stack – OS, middleware, applications and databases – and GridApp will fulfill this need.
Click here to find out more about BMC Software's acquisition of GridApp
BSM: Is RemedyForce a combo of Saleforce cloud and BMC BSM technology?
HVH: RemedyForce combines the powerful delivery and development capabilities of the Force.com platform with BMC’s market-leading expertise in IT Service Management. RemedyForce is an implementation of BMC technology on the Force.com platform and leverages the architecture and capabilities of that platform.
BSM: What is the difference between BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management and BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management and BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite?
HVH: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) enables IT organizations and service providers to build and run cloud computing environments. The same technology is used to support public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. The focus is on self-service, automation and dynamic provision of cloud services.
BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management (BPPM) is our market leading solution to provide performance and availability solutions across physical, virtual and cloud environments. This solution supports agent-based and agentless monitoring, coupled with powerful predictive analytics to head off performance issues before they happen.
BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite (ITSM) is the industry’s leading integrated application set for Service Management. ITIL V2 and V3 compliant, this solution provides incident, problem, change and asset management – as well as service request management, a service catalog, CMDB and best-practice process models. Many organizations have developed unique applications on the Remedy platform, which is the most widely used service management solution. This platform (and its service catalog) is used as the base for our self-service portal for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, enabling users to combine cloud and non-cloud services in a single model.
Click here to read Part One of the BSMdigest interview with Herb VanHook, BMC's VP of Strategy
About Herb VanHook
Herb VanHook is Vice President of Strategy in the Office of the CTO at BMC Software, with a particular focus on the technology impacts and opportunities presented by cloud computing models. He has worked in strategic, corporate development, and business planning functions since joining BMC in 2005. Previously, he held several executive positions at industry analyst firm META Group (now Gartner, Inc.) including Executive Vice President and Research Director, and last serving as META’s interim President and Chief Operating Officer. He has more than 30 years of experience in information technology – across operations, development, support, and management – including positions at IBM, Computer Associates, and Legent Corporation.