CRN Interview: Jim Grant, Remedy

BMC Software's acquisition of Remedy in 2002 cemented BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) strategy, which aims to help companies manage their IT needs from a business perspective. Remedy's Vice President and General Manager, Jim Grant, recently spoke with Managing Editor Charlene O'Hanlon about the business application vendor's role in BSM and its product and channel plans for the coming year.

CRN: What has Remedy brought to BMC since the acquisition?

GRANT: If you followed BMC's strategy we introduced in April, called Business Service Management, it's very indicative of why the acquisition of Remedy was made. Remedy is a great company,great tradition, great customer set, great technologies, great partners, great channel and so on. Those are good fiduciary reasons why a tech company like BMC would be interested. But it would not have meant nearly as much as it does in the context of a strategy that pulls together what we call the ITSM (IT service management) layer that Remedy provides and the operational availability and performance layers that BMC is well-known for. %85 It's not a brand-new idea, but it required a company like BMC to come together with a company like Remedy to fulfill the promise.

I have a lot of energy around this because it's not one company acquired another, it's two companies that came together to form a strategy that was necessary in the marketplace and for our customers, and we're doing it.

BSM is as important to Remedy as it was to BMC, and [BSM] is something that was not created to accommodate the messaging of Remedy and BMC. Remedy was acquired to fulfill the promise of BSM.

CRN: Let's talk about BSM and how Remedy fits into the strategy.

GRANT: If you go to traditional and evolving IT shops, you find the business-touching layers of the organization at what we call the ITSM layer. The ITSM layer %85 includes things like help-desk, change management, asset management, service-level agreement management. Those are the four modules that are pretty standard modules in the Remedy ITSM suite. Each of them touch at one end the businesses they serve,service agreements, asset management, help-desk,and they are a translation layer of a business' needs into the IT organization that serves the line of business.

When you [ask] what historically has been the practice of managing an IT organization and the operational infrastructure, traditionally it's been to focus on managing a network or managing a computer or managing an application or database. If you manage them all as ends in and of themselves, then you were taking care of business. But the fact is, a business transaction, a business application,something that serves the business,runs across all of those things: networks, computers, applications, databases and storage. You really need to look at the management problem from what we call the business-relevant perspective.

And so the whole idea of BSM is you begin to marry the process business-touching technologies of Remedy with the operational technologies from BMC and you align management against a business purpose. Certainly, we manage networks, but in the context of a business service. And so more and more we are reporting out, we are alerting and alarming and so on relative to how the business [is] being served rather than [whether a] computer [is] running right.

CRN: How does the channel fit into this strategy?

GRANT: The channel has always been and is becoming even more important to Remedy. The channel is about 50 percent of our total business worldwide. And we expect that to grow. And we find in our channel partners around the world some of the best expertise available around ideas [such as] IT service management and business service management, from small organizations that are regional or even city-based all the way up to virtual, nation-based organizations. Some may be very focused on a particular technology and so we've got highly focused Remedy-only resellers. We've got Remedy-only and Remedy-BMC flavors of resellers: Remedy-only would be focused only on implementing the Remedy Action Request System against either custom applications that a customer might have or the Remedy set of applications and suites. [Some are] highly focused; some of them base their entire business on Remedy, and expanding out from that are larger shops that do consulting and implementation on ITSM and BSM-kinds of ideas.

CRN: It sounds like Remedy is doing more than playing a role in BSM. You're also still marketing your products as stand-alones.

GRANT: Absolutely. The intent was this is a strong brand, strong organization. Make it stronger.

CRN: What's happening with Remedy in the coming year?

GRANT: We mentioned it a little bit. One is expansion of our channel approach, and in combination with BMC, you'll see BMC expand its approach [and] its accommodation to, and work with, our channel partners. You'll see Remedy and BMC collaborate on expansion of the channel around Business Service Management. We're pushing hard across the Americas, including Canada and Latin America. Because we deal with such large, multinational corporations, we are pushing hard in Asia-Pacific, we've always had a great presence in the European markets, but what it means is that global companies can implement these technologies and pass control around the world. This is part of our DNA. When you see a company [with a strong channel program] on a worldwide basis, you know it's part of how this company is made up.