BMC^® Service Impact Manager 5.0, which will ship in December, will include the BMC Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and integrate with new discovery solutions to better automate population, validation, and management of the service model of all the IT assets within a company and their relationship to business services created by BMC Service Impact Manager. As a result, companies will be able to understand the business impact of IT problems to support real-time problem resolution and decision-making. IT change decisions can be made based on an understanding of the resulting business impact and within the context of the organization's business priorities.

"As a company that seeks to provide superior service, our goal is to align our IT with our business to empower the way we deliver services to our customers," said Juan Manuel Arciniega, Liverpool, Mexico's premier department store chain. "BMC Software's Business Service Management strategy is playing a key role in helping us to better align our IT assets with our business goals. Our implementation of BMC Service Impact Manager, PATROL^® and MAINVIEW^® solutions will provide us with greater visibility into our overall business and we are encouraged to see that BMC is continuing to deliver new products to further support its strategy. BMC Software's strength on both the distributed and mainframe platform is one of their key differentiators in the BSM market and we look forward to utilizing the strengths they bring in these areas to further enhance our service to our customers."

Today, BMC Software is also announcing the general availability of two of its discovery solutions, Discovery Express, which provides an agent-less capability to identify what components make up a company's IT environment, and Marimba Configuration Discovery from BMC Software, which can enrich asset information with additional detail on how those assets are configured. These discovery solutions are part of BMC Software's CCM solutions announced in June that deliver business-aware discovery and detection; process-based change management; and policy-based configuration automation.

Service Model Management Automation Empowers BSM
BMC Service Impact Manager combines powerful business service modeling capabilities with enterprise event management, automation and notification solutions to transform availability and performance data into detailed knowledge about the status of business services, enabling companies and IT groups to proactively manage services in real-time and increase the service levels offered to their customers. The Service Impact Manager service model understands and tracks the dependencies between technology components and how they are combined to deliver IT services, and ultimately business services, to users. Key features of BMC Service Impact Manager 5.0 enable the automated management of the service model, including:

• BMC Configuration Management Database (CMDB) - provides a bi-directional linkage between the service model and all BMC Software and third-party sources, as well as, automated reconciliation of data from multiple discovery sources from both the physical and application levels, including a rules-based capability for identifying matches;
• A new BMC Impact Service Model Editor - provides a highly graphical tool for building the service model while leveraging the CMDB to incorporate objects and relationships from Remedy Asset Management and/or discovery sources. It also enables multiple users to build portions of the service model;
• Integration with BMC Software Discovery Solutions - identifies all aspects of the business-critical IT environment and shows how systems are connected and applications are related in order to automatically build the logical relationships between applications and their dependent components;
• Integration with Remedy IT Service Management Suite for the Enterprise - provides tight integration between the service model of the Service Impact Manager and assets managed through Remedy^® Asset Management, Remedy Change Management, and Remedy Help Desk.

"As a BMC Software BSM Certified Partner, Seamless knows the importance of aligning IT with the business and understands the impact this can have on a company's success," said Kevin Johnson, president, Seamless, which provides customers a seamless, digitally managed end-to-end service management solution. "Service impact management plays a critical role in making sure that businesses are able to achieve their goals and the integration between BMC Service Impact Manager and the BMC Configuration Management Database strengthens a customer's ability to do just that. Utilizing BMC Service Impact Management solutions, our expertise in services delivery, service support and infrastructure engineering provides a firm foundation on which our customers can depend upon."

"Twenty percent of business-critical downtime is caused by scheduled changes that don't take into consideration the dependencies between IT components and critical business services," said Mary Nugent, vice president and general manager, Service Management Solutions, BMC Software. "BMC Software leadership in delivering the broadest and deepest support for managing the entire IT infrastructure is complemented by the power of BMC Service Impact Manager 5.0 to address this issue by automating the management of the service model."

New Portal, Reporting Capabilities and Integrations Strengthen Service Impact Management
Implementing service impact and event management capabilities is another Route to Value BMC Software has seen its customers take in achieving BSM. In strengthening this route for customers, BMC Service Impact Manager 5.0 includes additional features for understanding service delivery status and the impact and root causes of problems, as well as new integrations with BMC Software's mainframe and database management solutions:

• BMC Impact Portal - The BMC Impact Portal, a new Web-based graphical user interface (GUI), delivers BMC Service Impact Manager information on demand through a customer's existing environment. Using this portal, business and service managers can view the status of their services in several views and reports. Customizable dashboard views allow users to see only the information that is important to them without excessive navigation.
• BMC Impact Reporting - In continuing to deliver on its recently announced partnership with Business Objects, the world's leading provider of business intelligence solutions, BMC Software will deliver BMC Impact Reporting as part of BMC Service Impact Manager 5.0. Based on the BMC Reporting Foundation created with Business Objects, BMC Impact Reporting provides users with a flexible, easy-to-use reporting infrastructure to schedule, analyze, manage and distribute built-in and custom reports for IT and executive audiences.
• Integration to BMC Software's MAINVIEW^® and SmartDBA® - By adding additional integration between BMC Software's MAINVIEW suite of solutions for monitoring, management, optimization and automation across the z/OS and OS/390 enterprise and to SmartDBA data management solutions, BMC Software provides the unmatched capability to manage mainframe and database environments in the context of the business. [See release, "BMC Software Significantly Expands Mainframe Component of its Business Service Management Strategy," also announced today.]

About BMC Software
BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2004 revenues of more than $1.4 billion. For more information about BMC Software, visit www.bmc.com. For additional information on BSM, visit www.bmc.com/bsm.