BMC Unifies IT Management for Infrastructure and Applications

In one of its first major initiatives since going private, BMC Software this week launched an upgrade to its IT management software that for the first time addresses both infrastructure and applications.

Mati Pitkanen, director of solutions marketing at BMC, says BMC TruSight Operations 10 marks the first time the company is providing the ability to holistically manage the entire IT environment via a common user interface.

“You can now manage over 100 different technologies,” says Pitkanen. “It’s completely unified.”

Pitkanen says BMC's IT management software is making extensive use of REST APIs (application programming interfaces) to provide the unification of IT infrastructure and application management.

In addition, Pitkanen says that BMC has included predictive analytics capabilities to identify performance trends in real time, before they have an adverse impact on any given application.

Finally, Pitkanen says BMC is also now providing the ability to identify all the components that make up a particular end user experience to enable IT organizations to address specific issues.

The degree to which organizations actually want to converge application performance management with infrastructure management will vary. In general, the DevOps movement has definitely led to application and infrastructure teams working more collaboratively with one another.

But it’s unclear to what degree this convergence might ultimately result in the redefining of job functions within IT organizations. There’s clearly a need for IT infrastructure specialists inside the data center. But increasingly IT teams are being organized around applications rather than horizontal layers of technologies.

In the meantime, discovering the source of any given issue using a common set of tools should result in faster resolutions of those issues. Instead of wasting time trying to correlate data across multiple IT management frameworks, Pitkanen says BMC TruSight Operations 10 provides a common framework through which various IT specialists can collaborate using a common set of data.

Of course, from a business perspective Pitkanen notes that there’s also more riding on IT these days as more business processes become digital, which means rather than simply being an inconvenience, IT issues today are more likely than ever to have a material impact on the business.

As a result, IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to both manage more applications than ever. That generally means there also more IT infrastructure being deployed as those applications continues to scale. What often does not necessarily follow, however, is a corresponding increase in IT management headcount to address all that increased complexity.