The new bundling, called BMC Service Automation, takes a few dozen BMC offerings including CMDB, change configuration management tools, and the recently acquired RealOps run-book automation offering. Rounding it out, BMC announced the acquisition of Emprisa Networks for configuring network devices.
BMC Service Automation essentially rebrands the RealOps technology that provides what Gartner Group terms Run Book Automation. It’s essentially a form of workflow automation of IT infrastructure management processes. It pairs it with BMC’s existing tooling that manages changes in configurations of servers, clients, storage, and with the just-announced Emprisa acquisition, networks. And it is driven with links to BMC’s Atrium CMDB.
With the new release, BMC has more than doubled the number of IT operations workflow templates from 700 to over 1600. It has
The result is comparable to HP/Opsware’s Automation System, which itself has recently undergone a product refresh that tied in its own iConclude run book automation piece with the rest of the Opsware. BMC claims that, while the HP/Opsware bundle focuses mostly on the data center, its offering extends change configuration management coverage to clients ranging from desktops and laptops to mobile devices.
Like RealOps, which BMC acquired several months ago, Emprisa is an existing partner that has already tied its offerings to BMC’s Atrium CMDB and Change Management System products. As such, it has required relatively little work to have a bundled offering by day one of the announcement.
But for now the integration with CMDB and the rest of the Service Automation suite is unidirectional. Today, you can trigger a change into Emprisa from Service Automation, but it can not yet pull data from Service Automation to correlate which business services run on that device. That enhancement is on BMC’s roadmap.
BMC Service Automation, which is not a single offering but a collection of products, is available now.
Our View
There’s little question that this is BMC’s response to HP/Opsware. But of course the company emphasizes this is not a defensive move, pointing to IDC figures showing that its change configuration management business grew over 20% last year. In fact, both companies are probably at similar stages, having only recently drawn the pieces together that can be choreographed by the run book automation workflows.
The Emprisa offering is analogous to the Rendition product picked by Opsware back in 2004, and subsequently OEM’ed to Cisco as its network device configuration tool. That puts the BMC at a slight disadvantage to Opsware when it comes to configuring Cisco devices that already have the Opsware technology managing their configurations. With the Emprise technology, BMC’s Service Automation piece can order a change in status for Cisco, but the actual manipulation of configurations would have to be performed in the Opsware tool.
But, to provide an idea that both entrants are pretty comparable, BMC points to its advantage in change configuration management of clients, an area it claims Opsware falls short. BMC’s corporate strategy vice president Herb Van Hook boasted displacing Opsware at one client on the strength of BMC’s client capabilities.
