BMC Pushes Into Service Management

Derived from BMC's acquisition of IT Masters in late March, the new products include BMC Service Impact Manager and BMC Event Manager, which were previously sold together as MasterCell by IT Masters, said Mark Levy, director of product management for service management solutions at BMC, Houston.

The products are the first offered under the BMC brand, a new umbrella brand for products that enable business service management across BMC's other product lines, including its BMC Patrol systems management, Mainview mainframe management, InControl batch scheduling and output management and Remedy IT service and help desk management software.

Service Impact Manager defines the relationship between business services and physical IT assets that support them, creating models that help end users visualize the connections, Levy said.

The tool also includes root-cause analysis capabilities that identify trouble spots on the network, he said.

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Customers can also use the tool's modeling capabilities to create "what if" scenarios to evaluate what impact network changes would have on service performance, said John Siniawski, senior partner at Renovance, a management consultant and service provider based in Chicago.

"You're able to create models to see what happens if other problems come up down the line," Siniawski said.

By tying network components to specific services such as order processing, human resources or payroll, the tool helps IT departments prioritize their work, Levy said.

"If there are three people in an IT department and 15 servers are down, we can tell them which 12 they can ignore," he said.

BMC Event Manager collects and correlates availability and performance data from network components and provides role-based views to end users. It can then feed the data to Service Impact Manager, which also integrates with event management systems from BMC competitors such as Hewlett-Packard or IBM Tivoli, Levy said.

A starter kit for Service Impact Manager and management of 300 service components starts at $80,000. Additional bundles for 50 service components cost $12,000. A typical business service runs on 100 to 300 service components, Levy said.

Event Manager pricing starts at $50,000.