BMC: Going private will not affect customers

BMC Software has moved to reassure its Australian customers that its recent Nasdaq de-listing and subsequent privatisation will not negatively affect them.

Speaking at customer event in Sydney, BMC's VP Asia Pacific, Chip Salyards, said that the new ownership — private equity firms Bane Capital, Golden Gate, Insight Venture Partners, and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation — would result in greater customer collaboration and product customisation.

"As a customer, nothing has changed on the front-end of how we work. We are still maintaining the diligence around booking orders, and the credibility of how we do our business," he said.

"What we are doing with customers today is talking about where they want to see the products go, where they are seeing additional challenges and obstacles, and where they want us to focus our time.  For customers it is more interactive and they will see speed in the interactions."

In addition, in offering SaaS-based versions of its software, the vendor would also offer more frequent software upgrades — two to three per year, according to Salyards — as opposed to once every nine to 12 months with on-premise software.

Expanding on the impact of going private, Salyards said BMC would be able to move from focusing on short-term investments based on quarterly cycles to longer-term investments with a potentially three to five-year windows.

"You have to do things that are right, and you have to do things that are right now," he said. "Sometimes the right now thing doesn't pay off as the right thing."

"With a publically traded company you are on these 90 day cycles so you can't change from an on-premise model to a SaaS model. You are a little bit restricted in the investments made and how great you can make them."

Salyards said a need for additional funding or any issue related to revenues or profitability were not influences on the decision to de-list and go private.

"You see a lot of these start-ups starting to go public to get funds. BMC is the opposite: we generate a very nice profit — hundreds of millions of dollars of profit on an annual basis. We didn't need money to fund things we wanted to do.

"What we really needed to do as a company to get that next phase [of growth] was longer term investments ... Our [private] investors want a bigger return [on their capital] ... but knowing that they have to make some investments."

This investment, Salyards said, would be in three main areas: cloud, big data, and SaaS. In addition, the company could also invest in its mainframe offerings. For instance, Salyards said the company would move to offer scheduling on mainframes using Hadoop.