BMC pragmatic cloud management

It's been quite a while since I last spoke with Lilac Schoenbeck, BMC's Senior Manager of Cloud Computing Marketing. As with previous conversations it was a refreshing, no spin included, conversation of the pain people are feeling and what her company is doing to address that pain. I was pleasantly surprised by straightforward and yet comprehensive nature of BMC's cloud computing initiative.

BMC is now offering a range of products to address the following cloud adoption needs. Here's how they describe them:

• Cloud Planning — Discover and assess existing IT assets. Develop technical and business plans for transitioning into a cloud environment.
• Cloud Lifecycle Management — Enable flexible provisioning of configurable and customizable cloud services through a self-service portal driven by a service catalog. Enable secure multi-tenancy through network integration and resource utilization with automated decommissioning.
• Cloud Operations and Optimization — Proactively monitor the cloud to predict and repair performance issues before they impact users. Actively manage capacity to ensure optimal use of hardware resources.
• Cloud Governance — Run IT like a business, with visibility and predictability of financial metrics. View and manage asset usage for reduced costs.

Snapshot analysis

It is clear that medium and large organizations are not going to abandon decades of investment in computing solutions and leap to comprehensive cloud computing solution. What's far more likely is for those companies to keep doing what they're doing in the way that their currently doing it. BMC appears to understand that an incremental, evolutionary approach is far more likely.

Pilot projects in which a few, relatively contained functions are hosted in a cloud environment are likely to be the first move organizations make. Some organizations, liking the promise of the self-service, self-managing delivery and consumption model of cloud computing, might seek to refine their current IT assets as an on-premise, in-house cloud.

BMC understand that in both cases, these organizations need management, automation and orchestration tools that work on their current systems (mainframes, midrange systems as well as X86-based industry standard systems) and on similar systems hosted in a cloud computing environment. The company has extended current products to work in both environments in the same or very similar ways.

If your organization is considering making a move towards cloud computing, it might be wise to talk with BMC about their pragmatic approach to utilizing cloud computing as tool.