BMC and BladeLogic: Timing is everything

The technology industry loves to talk about anything that is new. Whether it's IT virtualization, SOA, or Web 2.0, venture capitalists, analysts, and the press team up and transform the latest thing into technonirvana.

OK, maybe this is just human nature, but in our business, it is important to remember that the IT triad consists of people, processes, and technology. In other words, enterprise technology ain't worth squat, unless a bunch of highly skilled nerds can monitor boxes, follow directions, and turn individual piece parts into a cohesive system.

Yup, the "people and process" part of the equation isn't sexy, but it is often the difference between success and failure. This is more true today than any time in the annals of IT lore. As IT becomes a bunch of virtual widgets and loosely coupled applications, people and processes glue all this dynamic complexity together.

As W. Edwards Deming stated, "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." Few CIOs ever want to suffer the consequences of this type of ignorance.

With this background, BMC's acquisition of BladeLogic can certainly be viewed as a way to bolster the company's "people and process" expertise. BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) mantra is closely aligned with IT governance processes like the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a potpourri of IT processes, checklists, and metrics.

Want to measure IT performance? BMC knows how to do this in spades. What was always missing from BMC's portfolio, however, was the ability to marry rich-management information with process automation. For example, when server utilization reaches a certain threshold, IT managers need the ability to immediately provision new servers and balance workloads accordingly. This is exactly what BladeLogic brings to the BMC party.

With BladeLogic, BMC joins a very small group of vendors that offer tools and services for IT service management and process automation. Hewlett-Packard and IBM come to mind, but other legacy IT management companies continue to lag behind. In the meantime, data center automation is also on the radar screen of others, such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Symantec, and VMware. BMC's process expertise and technologies provide an excellent pragmatic complement to the wild dynamic world of IT automation.

BladeLogic does nothing for BMC's sex appeal in the IT industry, but the combined portfolio of products may help CIOs deploy and manage more exotic technologies more efficiently and effectively. I'll bet old Deming would think that ability was sexy too.