The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center doesn't measure the success of its IT systems in uptime but rather in patient care, Joe Furnaski told the 175-plus technology providers and users who gathered Thursday in New York for BMC Software Inc.'s latest business-service-management strategy conference.

"Mission critical in our environment is a whole different thing from other industries," said Furnaski, technical project director of electronic health-care records for UPMC, a network of 20 hospitals and doctor's offices in western Pennsylvania. What Furnaski likes most about BMC's products, and those of its business-service-management partners, is that they let UPMC's IT department communicate with the network's health-care providers in plain English, rather than in abstract codes decipherable only by the tech savvy.

Furnaski's views were seconded Thursday by Gary Glasscock, manager of service management for AIG American General Insurance, another BMC customer. "We realized this year that we didn't have the infrastructure in place to proactively address problems in our IT environment," Glasscock said. "We needed to connect our users and their problems with our application managers."

While these customer testimonies were hardly spontaneous, they highlighted some of the successes that BMC has met with as the company changes its business model from selling management software to selling a service that provides companies with greater visibility into their IT environments' inner workings.

When the economy took a turn for the worse a few years ago, companies were wondering what they had spent so much money on in the late 1990s, and this led to a cutback in IT spending, BMC president and CEO Bob Beauchamp says. They were also looking to consolidate applications, and the management tools that seemed to accompany every major IT initiative were a prime target. "The management-tools market was in need of a killer app," Beauchamp says.

In July 2002, Beauchamp approached BMC's board of directors with an idea to help the company's customers consolidate their management software under a new umbrella of products and services. This would become the business-service-management initiative that the company introduced in April 2003 and featured at Thursday's event.

According to BMC's various customers and technology partners, the company is onto something.

As demand for Red Hat Linux grows in the data center, it's coming in closer contact with a range of other operating systems, all of which require some form of management. "Customers want to know how they can implement Linux faster," Alex Pinchev, Red Hat's executive VP of worldwide sales and president of international operations, said at BMC's event. "But we understand that we live in complex, heterogeneous environments, and that we have to partner."

BMC said Thursday it will work with Red Hat to integrate a number of BMC's Marimba server and client software products with the Red Hat Network to improve the Linux provider's ability to deliver application and patch management. The two companies will also integrate BMC's Remedy Change Management software with the Red Hat Network. BMC is likewise expanding integration efforts with a number of other technology providers, including BEA Systems and VMware, a division of storage maker EMC Corp.

BMC also introduced Service Impact Manager 5.0, which will ship in December and is an upgrade to the current 4.5 version. It will include a configuration and management database and integrate with new discovery products to better automate population, validation, and management of the service model of all the IT assets within a company and their relationship to business services, says Mary Nugent, VP and general manager of BMC's Service Management Solutions group.

In conjunction, the company disclosed the availability of Discovery Express, an agentless component to identify what items make up a company's IT environment, and Marimba Configuration Discovery, which provides additional detail on asset configuration. BMC has also integrated Mainview, a mainframe management product, and SmartDBA, a data-management product, into the company's Service Impact Manager.

BMC acknowledges that its overarching business-service-management strategy could be a bit overwhelming at first blush. But Beauchamp insists his company's modular approach keeps the strategy relevant for smaller companies that aren't ready to think about the wall-to-wall integration of their applications under one management package.

"It's not a simple solution," Juan Manuel Arciniega, chief technology officer for Mexican retailer Liverpool, said of the business-service-management strategy. Liverpool, with 52 department stores and $2.2 billion in annual sales, isn't a small business, but Arciniega acknowledges that his company is still in the early stages of understanding how all the pieces of BMC's strategy fit together. Liverpool uses a number of BMC products, including Service Impact Manager, Patrol Enterprise Manager, and Remedy Asset Management.