BMC To Resellers: Tackle Platform One Step At A Time

BSM is the software vendor's overarching business technology solution that ties together the lowest level of point-product management with BMC's most sophisticated IT business process technology. Improvements such as tools to rate service levels from the end-user perspective are also on the way, said Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO of Houston-based BMC.

Make no bones about it, BSM is a hard-core enterprise offering, Beauchamp said, laying to rest an industry misconception that BSM would compete for SMB market share in the IT management space. "As you move away from mission-critical transaction computing toward day-to-day back-office computing, as you move away from where computing is the company to where computing helps the company, the BSM message becomes slightly less intense," he said.

BMC designed the partner program to simplify the process of mastering the complex BMC stack, and the company is now looking to train a select group of talented and resourceful resellers to sell and service BSM deployments, said William Donahoo, director of worldwide channel program development and marketing at BMC.

"What we are looking for initially are partners that have proven skills in enterprise management, IT service management and process consulting, [and] the ability to link the IT process with the business process," said Donahoo.

It's possible that only two dozen or so solution providers will become BSM-certified, he said. But the reward for these certified partners is lucrative professional services revenue, said Donahoo, who in August said BMC would make every effort to drive the bulk of its professional services revenue through qualified resellers.

The BSM program takes partners from their current level of BMC product expertise and grows that proficiency across as many BMC product lines as possible, according to Donahoo. For example, a BMC partner that currently specializes in selling and servicing the vendor's Remedy product would be graduated along a line of training to sell and service more complex BMC products such as Batch Impact Manager. But it makes no difference at what skill level a qualified reseller starts at, said Donahoo. "The incentive to flesh out expertise on the stack is the same," he said.

Kevin Johnson, founder of Seamless Technologies, a BMC partner based in Morristown, N.J., said that Seamless Technologies was the second BMC partner to become BSM-certified. The certification process wasn't easy, even though Seamless Technologies has been selling BMC products for nearly a decade, Johnson said.

"The certification process was long. There were several steps to it," he said. "It took a bit of work, but we already had the skill sets on board."

In the same way that BMC is certifying BSM partners one step at a time, the vendor is recommending that BSM resellers choose one or more "routes to value" that focus on specific problems within an enterprise IT organization instead of trying to sell all of BSM at once. These eight routes to value—which include areas such as incident and problem management, capacity management, and provisioning and asset management and discovery—give BSM-certified resellers a starting point to engage customers in the overall BSM conversation. Such a discussion, Beauchamp said, will foster greater interest in BSM and thus create more BMC product and service revenue for partners.

Tim Fox, Northeast area director of Infospectrum Consulting, a BMC VAR based in Pequannock, N.J., said BMC's routes to value strategy gives resellers a way to get a foot in the door with one component, then proceed to upsell the whole shebang. "It works. Go in small, then aim big," said Fox.

Seamless Technologies' Johnson said the route to value that most customers identify with is asset management and discovery. "That area is very big right now, and it resonates with a lot of customers who have been struggling with it."