BMC Completes ITM Acquisition

In a move that will strengthen its position in management applications for enterprise, BMC Software (NYSE: BMC) has acquired ITM software.

The acquisition of ITM is the latest in a series of strategic purchases by BMC dating back to at least 2004, as the company jockeys for position in the enterprise software management market.

The combined company will allow chief information officers (CIOs) to better see the business value of IT.

BMC is one of four giants dominating the enterprise-management software field, along with IBM Tivoli, CA (NASDAQ: CA) and Hewlett-Packard (NASDAQ: HPQ).

All four vendors are trying to move into what’s known as the business service management (BSM) or the IT Resource Planning (ITRP) space.

Forrester analyst Evelyn Hubbert defines BSM as an approach in which a CIO can look at the performance of key business services, applications and systems end to end and ensure they are tied directly to the enterprise’s business goals and objectives.

AMR director of research Dennis Gaughan said ITRP is an integrated set of technologies that aggregates information from multiple sources to provide user analysis and insight across six critical areas of management.

Those areas are strategy, demand, supply, people, money and risk.

This helps IT management run the business of IT, he told InternetNews.com.

ITM’s software product, the ITM Business Suite, has what the company calls the business-management database, on which an enterprise layers business intelligence for IT.

This gives enterprises “the ability to view and control and make decisions on that intersection of information,” Herb Van Hook, BMC’s vice president of business planning, told InternetNews.com.

The result is “a set of very high-level applications IT uses to run itself as a business organization within the enterprise,” Van Hook added.

For example, where most project management tools look at whether an enterprise has the right skills to deliver on the projects and whether it can meet deadlines, ITM “asks whether you’re doing the right projects; what is the business impact of this project versus that project,” Van Hook said.

Enterprises are increasingly looking at ways to run IT applications better, but generally they “use spreadsheets they have to cobble together and have to prepare a PowerPoint presentation once every quarter or so,” Van Hook added.

Dennis Gaughan, director of research at AMR, agrees that tools in this area are lacking. “There’s plenty of stuff to manage IT and operations and systems, but there’s a gap for something that rolls up the business value and shows you how much it costs, and that’s where ITM sits,” he said.

“They developed that integrated suite of software to answer the business-oriented questions CIOs are asking,” Gaughan added.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.