Cloud 'strategic' for BMC and its customers

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 15 July 2010 16:50

Business IT - Technology

According to Kia Behnia, CTO at business service management software company BMC, cloud is "one of our more strategic initiatives." BMC has been working with early adopters for around 18 months in order to develop an appropriate strategy.

Behnia told iTWire that said the customers involved in these hundreds of engagements fall into three categories: service providers, enterprises, and public organisations.

Service providers from telcos to systems integrators are looking for new ways to deliver existing services, and for opportunities to deliver new services). Enterprises are looking to evolve their data centres, but concerned that they target the right applications and use cases, and that they fit cloud into their overall IT structure.

Public organisations such as government agencies have "a very healthy interest" in cloud, Behnia said, possibly due to the economic environment. For example, some US states such as Washington and California are looking to the shared services model and are planning to consolidate dozens or hundreds of server rooms that are geographically and organisationally dispersed into a small number of shared and scalable data centres. In some cases, population growth means that the existing facilities at certain locations can no longer cope with the workload, adding to the push for next-generation data centres. Similar things are happening at the Federal level, he suggested.

Regardless of the sector, two themes regularly come up in discussions around cloud: improving agility and responsiveness, and gaining operational efficiencies and cost savings.

But what they don't want is to completely replace their existing processes and toolsets in order to accommodate cloud. "This has been one of the barriers to adoption," said Behnia. Hence BMC offers cloud lifecycle management products that can be used, for example, to set up a self service portal or to automate the provisioning and management of operating systems and applications in a private cloud or one operated by a service provider - but that also integrate with other tools in BMC's suite.

Private or public cloud? Please read on.