Once you can manage business applications, it’s a logical step to manage business processes, is how BMC Software Inc describes the new set of opportunities being presented to it through the continued evolution of its Patrol hardware, database and application management environment. It is an opportunity also being eyed hungrily by systems integrators who would love to be able to go into customer sites and manage the whole enchilada. We suspect it is just this kind of demand and the prospect of latching on to high-flying offerings like SAP AG’s R/3 (see our top stories) that is leading BMC to create knowledge modules for Patrol that will enable a company to manage its business processes right alongside and with the same tools and repositories as the applications they support. To broaden its appeal and keep up with the times, the company is also stepping up to embrace the Internet and is close to delivering early versions of new Patrol knowledge modules for managing Web servers and for managing distributed applications across the Internet. They will ship in the summer. It has not got to the point of putting a browser front-end on to the Patrol console as such but will enable Patrol applications to be called from browsers. BMC is also reported to be working on a general purpose management console through which users can view and manage their mainframe and open systems. It stresses that it is not talking about going up against the likes of CA-Unicenter, SunNet Manager and OpenView directly – it already integrates with them in any case; we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, although Patrol is being extended in many areas, for application monitoring and beyond. BMC has already organized itself into functional business units from its former technology system groups and there are said to be nine new strategic initiatives underway for enterprise back-up and recovery, enterprise applications management, database administration and space management, enterprise replication and data transport, performance optimization, network performance, IMS, DB2 and Security.
New release of MetaManage
It says it has more than 80 products slated for introduction during its fiscal 1997 which began in April; it got 52 away last year. Morgan Stanley’s technology group expects there to be 30 for Patrol, 30 for open systems, eight for DB2, five for net working, four each for IMS and internal, three each in parallel and recovery management and two for compression. As BMC Software turns the heat up under the brand equity in the Patrol name, the firm will gradually rename all of its 70 or 80 mainframe products accordingly. As Morgan Stanley notes, it will also reposition the Metasuite database administration tools as an extension to Patrol and rename them Patrol DB. It also has a new release of MetaManage in the pipeline which will address issues such as database schema change dependencies. Meantime, BMC has also introduced the first open systems versions of its Patrol Recovery Manager back-up and recovery software, for Oracle and Sybase. Console prices go from $3,500, server components start at $350. It is also offering DataTools Inc’s SQL-BackTrack database back-up software as Patrol SQL-BackTrack knowledge modules for Oracle Corp and Sybase Inc at from $350. The investment bank expects BMC will begin to see revenues from its Digital Equipment Corp relationship in the July timeframe. Every Alpha server will ship with a scaled down version of Patrol as part of the operating system installation routine. Its Hewlett-Packard Co relat-ionship is just coming on stream; Hewlett-Packard is bundling a Patrol component in its Measureware product. Sequent Computer Systems Corp has also written a knowledge module for Patrol that is the exclusive management system for their clustered machines. Morgan Stanley says Sequent, also a reseller of the Patrol product line, contributed around $2m to Patrol revenue last quarter. BMC says it is aiming to have 500 Patrol accounts in Europe by the end of its fiscal 1997, up from 300 now. It has 700 world-wide now running across 100,000 servers. BMC recently reported net profits for the year to March 31 up 36% at $106m after charges, on revenue up 24% to $429m.
