BMC, which specialises in system monitoring and control software, believes the decision will provide its 15,000 customers with new tools that can help them more easily manage their complex IT systems.

“It’s our first few steps in this space,” says BMC’s enterprise systems management group vice president Jim Grant. “We want to make ourselves very friendly to the open source development community.”

The company began its new push by hiring high profile open source evangelist William Hurley to help formulate strategy and direction. Hurley is charged with guiding the company through unfamiliar waters as it establishes a developer community and decides exactly how much of a place open source software will play in its overall vision.

Grant admits that BMC’s open source strategy is still being fleshed out, however he believes the potential of the decision to embrace open source is huge.

“We’re in the software business so we are developing our understanding of how these models will work,” he told ITWire. “Ultimately we don’t see it as a threat. We see it as something that’s good for us, our customers and the development community as well.”

Despite this enthusiasm for the concept of open source, Grant says there are no plans yet to open source any of BMC’s existing products.

“We are looking at elements of our software that could become open source. It’s too early to signal that but it is an examination we are undertaking. (But) I don’t see a world at all where we open source BMC software as a standard practice.”

The BMC open source program has started with the launch of a network developer site called BMCDN. The site contains development centres, discussion forums, blogs and software resources.

Four initial projects outlined on the site focus on creating adapters that can integrate both proprietary and open source applications into BMC’s flagship Configuration Management Database (CMDB). CMDB sits at the heart of the company’s vision for streamlining and standardising IT processes within large organisations.

CMDB is also an important element of BMC’s overriding vision for enterprise IT systems. Dubbed business service management (BSM), the vision is one where a unified management platform can align IT systems closely with a company’s business activities. It is also about automating and streamlining many of the costly and time consuming tasks that take up much of the resources and budgets within large IT departments.

“We’ve been architecturally coherent in our approach to this problem,” says Grant. “The idea itself is not rocket science, but the implementation takes a lot of staying on course. This is what we see as our core difference from HP.”

Grant says HP has too many overlapping and conflicting technologies. While its recent software acquisitions are starting to iron this out, he believes BMC’s early start will help it maintain a lead.

“There’s a battle of the titans (between HP and IBM),” says Grant. “That leaves an opening for a company like BMC to step in and say, regardless of platform, what is your problem and how can we best solve it from a software and services point of view.”

BMC itself recently announced the acquisition of software tool company RealOps. However the company says the purchase was not about filling a gap in its product portfolio, but rather taking things “to the next level”.

“IT has always been, in an odd way, the least automated department in large companies,” says BMC service management vice president Paul Avenant.

“IT’s always busy automating other processes but it has not automated itself. Right now we see a real focus on this. RealOps is a great technology for automating processes in your datacentre.”

The BMC acquisition has been likened to HP’s recent purchase of Opsware. That company provides tools designed to automate tasks such as server provisioning and management.