BMC has acquired UK IT management tools firm Tideway as it
builds its strategy to support IT management forcloud computing.
Jim Grant, senior vice-president of strategy at
BMC, said, "IT management needs to focus on what is relevant to
the business and provide an [IT] service. Cloud computing is a
dynamic way to deliver these services to the business."
He said BMC plans to adapt its business service management (BSM)
strategy for managing physical hardware to support cloud-based IT
services. BSM is BMC's terminology for managing the IT behind a
business process.
"
Virtualisation can be made more powerful through BSM," Grant
said, adding that BMC is working on products to automate physical
and virtualised computing capacity in a workflow-based way.
One of the areas BMC is focusing on is how to provide capacity
management in a virtualised environment. "Cloud computing is too
dynamic for traditional system tools to support. We can provide
real-time analysis of system management events to support capacity
planning," Grant said.
Without effective capacity planning, IT departments will be
unable to assess the impact of adding more virtual machines on
physical server hardware.
Tideway has an important role to play, Grant said. It provides
automatic discovery of an IT infrastructure, which allows IT
managers to categorise what they have. It can also work in a
virtual environment, to help IT managers combat virtual server
sprawl, where IT departments lose track of virtual machines.