BMC Cooks Up Partner Projects

Cook, who joined BMC from IBM three months ago, said the Houston-based company has already reorganized its services division—focusing its services team on large-scale projects and pushing all other pending services contracts to its partners. “When I got here, services had 1,600 open contracts and was doing everything,” she said. “We scaled services down to focus on large, complex opportunities and moved the rest to the channel.”

BMC partners are seeing those increased opportunities, said Randy Sebastian, operations manager at dbaDirect, a BMC partner in Florence, Ky. “We are seeing the biggest amount of activity we have ever seen from [BMC],” he said, adding that several big contracts are already about to close.

Cook has responsibility for services, channel partners and emerging markets. BMC defines emerging markets as all customers except 47 strategic customers and 1,900 enterprise customers.

In the first quarter, 70 percent of emerging markets revenue came through the channel, compared with 20 percent for the same quarter a year earlier, Cook said.

Last year, the emerging markets segment accounted for 11 percent of BMC&s total revenue. On average, she said BMC gets 30 percent of its emerging market revenue through the channel.

“My goal is to have 90 percent of the revenue we get from emerging markets come through the channel,” Cook said.

She admitted that BMC has had less-than-stellar success supporting its channel but pledged improvements. “BMC can no longer afford to grow the way it has historically, where it relied on its mainframe business,” she said. “The world is changing, and our partners are changing. We can&t grow without our partners.”

As part of that effort, BMC will place more emphasis on its SMB products, including its Remedy and Magic software lines. “We&ve really re-energized the Magic solution,” she said.

DAN NEEL contributed to this story.