HOUSTON – August 28, 2007 – Demonstrating ongoing dedication to customer-centric advancement and development, BMC Software today announced the results of its annual mainframe survey which gathers feedback from mainframe users worldwide on the strategic direction planned in their IT environments.

Key findings from the survey include views on the current and future role of the mainframe in business functions, drivers of mainframe investments, staffing concerns and perceptions of major management vendors in the marketplace.  In summary, the survey shows that companies still view the mainframe as a viable and healthy platform, as crucial for mission critical applications and they identified BMC as the overall technology leader in the space, specifically in the DB2, IMS, Batch Scheduling, Monitoring and Automation product segments.

Highlights of the survey include:

• More than half of the respondents expect overall MIPS consumption to increase, driven through both legacy growth and the introduction of new applications.  In particular, 78 percent of the larger shops foresee increased MIPS consumption.
• Contrary to recent analyst reports indicating Independent Software Vendor expenses as the primary inhibitor to mainframe growth, companies that are reducing or eliminating use of the mainframe cited management perceptions of mainframes being outdated and the cost of hardware as the most common reasons for these behaviors.
• 74 percent of respondents do not believe they can successfully move mission critical workloads to a distributed platform at any cost, while only half of those who believe they could execute a migration think it would save money.
• 40 percent of the respondents are “very concerned” about mainframe staffing for systems management, indicating competition for talent will continue to heat up.
• BMC led respondents’ perceptions of technology innovation and leadership for DB2, IMS, Batch Scheduling, Monitoring and Automation product segments.

“The survey always provides valuable insights into the specific needs and perceptions of the mainframe market and this year’s results include some particularly fascinating points which we will incorporate into future developments,” said Ralph Crosby, Chief Technology Officer for BMC’s Mainframe Service Management Business Unit. “The best avenue to explore how BMC can continue to provide value is directly from those working with the solutions, and as seen from the results, customers clearly regard us as a valuable partner too.”

More than 1,000 mainframe users participated in the survey consisting of pre-qualified respondents from both BMC’s global mainframe customer database as well as an external industry list.  Participants were asked for their insight into more than 20 questions. Responses were then analyzed using standard regression and statistical practices.