BMC out of options - feigns SaaS to confuse ITSM market
Posted by Matt French on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 10:52 AM
Imitation is the purest form of flattery. On January 19, 2010, BMC announced their intention to deliver Remedy ITSM On Demand in Q2 2010. BMC became the next legacy software vendor to validate the Service-now.com quest to change the IT management software landscape. In the last five years Service-now.com has turned a stagnant IT service management (ITSM) software market on its head, forcing legacy vendors to react.
If you like David vs. Goliath stories, you’ll enjoy this.
Service-now.com has made a practice of replacing BMC Remedy implementations with a modern Software as a Service (SaaS) application. BMC Remedy customers have chosen Service-now.com to capitalize on simplicity, power, flexibility and a substantially lower total cost of ownership.
The loss of strategic customers and maintenance revenue to Service-now.com forced BMC to identify an alternative strategy to legacy on-premise Remedy deployments.
Let’s cut through the marketing hype. BMC is announcing their intention to stick old Remedy ITSM technology in unspecified hosting facilities. This is not modern SaaS or modern software. Our expectation is that it will first only be available in the U.S., which would rule out customers with global operations. This new offering may encroach on the SME / SMB turf of BMC Service Desk Express on Force.com which hasn’t shipped yet either.
The origins of the Remedy application date back to the early 1990s. This same code base is the foundation for Remedy ITSM On Demand.
Historically, IT organizations procured Remedy applications due to the platform’s flexibility. Remember the BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS) tagline, “Your business, your way”? That was marginalized with the introduction of Remedy ITSM “pre-configured, out-of-the-box” and is about to be buried six feet under with the introduction of hosted client / server software.
BMC plans to put a container around Remedy ITSM and eliminate the flexibility and customization they used to be so proud of. In the Remedy ITSM On Demand offering, BMC strips Remedy of its core strength – customization.
BMC will claim Remedy ITSM is built on ITIL standards and has received a stamp of compliance. As hard as the vendor community tries to create a one-size-fits-all application, it is impossible to predict how a customer will use the software. ITIL or not, all organizations require application flexibility to best meet the needs of the business.
Based on our experiences working with the world’s largest IT organizations, a packaged application with little room for modification will fall short of most enterprise requirements. ITIL provides guidance, but it is not prescriptive. While Service-now.com is designed to be customized and allows users to build custom applications, BMC Remedy ITSM On Demand will force customers to morph processes to match the tool.
To be fair, BMC will probably offer customers the ability to customize the application – under a different statement of work (SOW). Our guess is that BMC will offer consulting services or managed services for an additional fee to deliver custom changes to the software, similar to HP SaaS for Service Manager.
What happens if I elect to have BMC customize the software? In the client / server world, someone is tasked with managing and applying upgrades to the system. Once customers deviate from the software standard, they are then treated as a “one off”. This requires additional staffing and costs money, which is why the application service provider (ASP) market failed about a decade ago.
Service-now.com continues to set the bar for which all other ITSM vendors are evaluated. Our customers don’t subscribe to Service-now.com because of the delivery model or the subscription license. The largest enterprises in the world partner with Service-now.com for the following reasons:
- Simplified and familiar modern Web user experience
- Single platform complimented by an organic product development strategy (no acquired tuck ins)
- Feature rich releases three times per year included in the subscription
- Automated upgrades preserve all customizations made by the customer
- A foundation built on ITIL process guidance with natural flexibility
- Platform as a service allows customers to build new applications
- Powerful integration
- Proven security and 99.97% availability (BMC Remedy ITSM On Demand expects 99.5% or about 50 minutes of downtime per week)
At this point, BMC is full of announcements and intentions. They have accurately identified SaaS as the future of ITSM. But while BMC is determining where their legacy apps will be hosted, we’ll be busy working on our next major release. The May 2010 Release will include runbook automation, shared services, mobile field services and more project portfolio management, all built organically by Service-now.com with the same intuitive user experience all our ex-BMC customers have grown to love.
I certainly don’t have all the answers and would love your take on BMC’s plans. What are your thoughts?