"Before the Boole & Babbage acquisition, they didn't have a console that allowed you to see an end-to-end view of the environment," Noel says. "As a result, you could have had a lot of different installations of Patrol if you were a really large company, and there was no way to pull it all together. The Boole & Babbage acquisition gives them that enterprise console."

BMC VP of marketing Wayne Morris agrees. "Our flagship product in the distributed world was Patrol, and we had a number of mainframe performance-monitoring tools, but we didn't have an enterprise console to bring it all together. We've got that now with Command/Post."

This type of functionality is important to Jeff Loesch, a manager of Unix administration with Hewitt LLC, a human-resources consulting firm in Lincolnshire, Ill. Loesch says the integration of an enterprise console into BMC's product portfolio helps make his job easier, particularly in the area of network management.

Before Patrol's integration with the Command/Post console, "they were really just a point solution that would integrate into an existing framework, and now they've become more than that," Loesch says of BMC. "They have the central console that both the mainframe and Unix can tie into, and so it's a lot easier to use Patrol to monitor applications, as well as the infrastructure behind them."

But even with the much-needed addition of an enterprise console, BMC must also execute in other areas, analysts say. Noel points to the problem of agent integration. Each of BMC's tools requires a separate monitoring agent. There's a monitoring agent for operating-system platforms and another for enterprise resource planning applications and enterprise-messaging apps.

"They have to get to the point where they have only one agent for all their monitoring capabilities, instead of one agent for Best/1 [a capacity-planning and performance-analysis tool for mainframes and client-server environments] and one agent for Patrol," and so on, Noel says. "But they've been working on that. We expect an announcement by the middle of the year, at which time it should all finally be integrated into one product."

Looking ahead, revenue from Patrol in the client-server market should continue to be robust, Morris says. It's in the burgeoning service-provider markets, however, that BMC--like other systems-and network-management vendors--expects growth to soar. In 1999, BMC unveiled Patrol for e-Business Management, a variant of its popular systems-and network-management tool designed for service providers, as well as dot-coms and enterprises. BMC's Patrol for E-business Management is designed to provide a holistic view across a company's own internal network and the Internet by reporting on application availability right up to the client-side Web browser. Patrol for E-business Management provides a snapshot of not only how an application behaves in its own environment, but also how real-world conditions across the Internet affect application availability and response times.

This year, the company has also sought to entice Internet service providers and others with a rapid deployment program--dubbed "Guaranteed Ontime Implementation"--and a certification program for E-businesses--dubbed OnSite.

OnSite comprises a certification effort coupled with a bundling of products, services, and support that service providers can use to assure customers that they're deploying their E-businesses on a scalable infrastructure. Guaranteed Ontime Implementation "particularly appeals to E-businesses and service providers, where it's all about time to market," BMC's Morris says. "We're saying we can implement faster, and guaranteeing that we'll do it on time."

In the service-provider space in particular, BMC hopes to distinguish its solutions by stressing their application-centric network management capabilities. Rather than simply obtaining a networkwide device view, "think instead about a display that shows the critical application and shows you the health of the application, that gives you the ability to drill into the app when something is happening," Morris says. "It's able to drill into specific layers of technology, such as the operating system, the database, and even the network itself."

But while BMC expects its greatest short-term growth to accrue by virtue of service providers, company officials are optimistic that the future of E-business--that is, business-to-business integration--will also play to BMC's traditional enterprise strengths. "If you're not able to deal with both traditional systems and the Web, then you're just doing a small portion of what's needed to make sure that an E-business runs," says BMC's Kruger.

In this area, says Noel of D.H. Brown, BMC has distinguished itself from other vendors in the network-and systems-management market. "BMC is going to hit hardest in this E-business performance-management space, and it's going to say that you don't need a whole framework to manage service levels," she says. "What you need, BMC says, is monitoring agents and the ability to drill down into the applications themselves."

return to page 1