BMC beefs up cloud management

BMC Software has introduced new a new platform designed to help enterprises better manage and safeguard their cloud investments and operations.

The software brings performance and capacity management into the mix to help IT pros address outages and also provides a full view of their cloud-based infrastructure. The offerings are part of the company’s BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management platform and are timely, the company says, given recent highly publicized cloud outages.

“We think of this as what you have to keep a cloud operating once services have been provisioned,” said Lilac Schoenbeck, senior manager of cloud marketing for BMC. “Cloud operations is a real gap—people aren’t talking about what it takes to keep the service operating. It’s both a performance management and a capacity management issue, and it’s something our customers are increasingly concerned about when they set up these services.”

In fact, Schoenbeck said, in many cases it is BMC’s customers—not the company—that brings up concerns about management in the cloud.

“This is a need that customers are coming to us with—we are responding to their very valid concerns,” she said. “The ops team is raising its hand and saying, ‘How am I going to support this influx of new services?’”

BMC tried to leverage what its customers had already invested in for operations software, Schoenbeck said, and also tie in assets that BMC gained in recent acquisitions—products from Neptuny for capacity management, and products from Coradiant for end-user management.

“We’ve invested a great deal in our existing solutions in this space to make them cloud-aware, and made some acquisitions to bolster some of the gaps in our portfolio,” Schoenbeck said. “You should be able to use the same technologies, but they have to be enhanced to be able to handle the dynamic nature of cloud. You have to be able to support cloud services regardless of where the service resides.”