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BMC Software Sues ServiceNow for Patent Infringement

BMC Software has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against ServiceNow.

According to the lawsuit filed Sept. 23, 2014, ServiceNow has built much of its business around the infringement of BMC’s patented technologies. In the filing, BMC claims its patents are being violated by products that comprise core elements of ServiceNow’s IT management offerings, including:

- Incident Management and Problem Management
- Performance Analytics
- Configuration Management, including ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
- Discovery
- Orchestration
- Change and Release Management

ServiceNow is accused of violating seven different BMC patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The case is BMC Software, Inc. v. ServiceNow, Inc., No. 2:14-cv-903, and was filed on behalf of BMC by the McKool Smith law firm.

BMC’s IT management innovations are the subject of more than 300 current and pending patents before the USPTO.

“BMC Software has invested billions of dollars and years of hard work in our innovative and foundational technology. We must protect our technology against those who would try to make it their own without permission,” says Patrick Tagtow, BMC’s General Counsel. “ServiceNow’s widespread infringement of BMC’s patents has left us with no choice but to go to court.”

The court filing lists ServiceNow’s product offerings, but points out that, unlike BMC, ServiceNow holds no patents of its own.

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BMC Software Sues ServiceNow for Patent Infringement

BMC Software has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against ServiceNow.

According to the lawsuit filed Sept. 23, 2014, ServiceNow has built much of its business around the infringement of BMC’s patented technologies. In the filing, BMC claims its patents are being violated by products that comprise core elements of ServiceNow’s IT management offerings, including:

- Incident Management and Problem Management
- Performance Analytics
- Configuration Management, including ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
- Discovery
- Orchestration
- Change and Release Management

ServiceNow is accused of violating seven different BMC patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The case is BMC Software, Inc. v. ServiceNow, Inc., No. 2:14-cv-903, and was filed on behalf of BMC by the McKool Smith law firm.

BMC’s IT management innovations are the subject of more than 300 current and pending patents before the USPTO.

“BMC Software has invested billions of dollars and years of hard work in our innovative and foundational technology. We must protect our technology against those who would try to make it their own without permission,” says Patrick Tagtow, BMC’s General Counsel. “ServiceNow’s widespread infringement of BMC’s patents has left us with no choice but to go to court.”

The court filing lists ServiceNow’s product offerings, but points out that, unlike BMC, ServiceNow holds no patents of its own.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...