Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Could you summarize BMC’s philosophy in terms of your product roadmap in the area of the cloud?

Mark Settle: We have a SaaS offering for one of our principal offers, our remedy service staff solution. Now customers can implement that on campus, as they have done in the past. They basically have access to two versions. One is a hosted solution we call “Remedy on demand,” and the second is a version of remedy that has been written on a Force.com platform called “Remedy Force.” As you mentioned before, there are a lot of IT people or shops who want to come out of the IT business and who don’t want to worry about the hardware or the DR capability.

We have seen that capability embraced by our customers. We are continuing to look at our products and see if there are other tools like that, which should be offered to customers as a service more than a licensed piece of software. This is part of the strategy of moving forward. Then there is the consumerization of IT. People will want to interact with our tools, and we are going to have to think about how they are going to use their smartphones and their tablets to really leverage the IT capabilities within their companies to get their jobs done. IT shops spend a lot of time pushing their information to users in the hope of helping them. The tablet in particular opens an interesting opportunity to put the employee in control and let them subscribe to the types of information from IT that they really want. This is similar to the classic App Store model that Apple pioneered. What are the small bits of information people really want? Instead of making users open monolithic applications on their laptop, on which they just scratch the surface.

SM: Is your focus entirely on enterprises, or do you also provide services to the mid-market?

MS: We have some mid-market customers. They usually have particular problems to solve, so they typically purchase portions of our total product. They may implement a service desk solution or try to automatize capacity utilization within their server farm. Large enterprises tend to invest in the entire platform because they don’t want to become general contractors and have to integrate all their system management tools from different members. The smaller businesses tend to solve one problem at a time.

SM: When you say smaller businesses, what size are you talking about?

MS: I am talking about $300 million to $500 million tech companies. They might have a small service staff of around 10 to 20 people.

SM: Is there anything else you would like to add?

MS: Thank you for taking time. It has been a pleasure.

SM: Thank you, and we will talk soon.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: A Second Conversation with Mark Settle, CIO of BMC
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