Industry First: BMC Software’s Agent-less Scheduling Solution Helps Customers Manage Business Impacts “Down to the Minute”

HOUSTON, August 28, 2006 – BMC Software today launched the industry’s first agent-less, enterprise-wide scheduling solution, enabling businesses to predict, adapt and control an organization’s reaction to change on a minute-by-minute basis. 

The significantly upgraded version of the BMC CONTROL-M software solution provides enterprise CIOs and their IT management teams with an integrated, single-view management console that cuts across mainframe and distributed systems, including those previously considered inaccessible.  As the industry’s first agent-less scheduling solution, it marks a major advance in BMC’s Business Service Management (BSM) offerings and a clear lead over all competitors.

Andi Mann, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, said: “BMC Software is raising the bar over their competitors with this initiative, and providing a solution that will benefit any enterprise, large or small.  Now with the choice of both agent-based and agent-less job scheduling, BMC CONTROL-M provides strong benefits with a flexible, secure, and functional solution to a significant enterprise problem.  With this announcement, BMC CONTROL-M is setting a new standard in job scheduling, providing enterprises with unrivalled flexibility and agility to deploy enterprise-class agent-based and agent-less scheduling ‘out-of-the-box’.”

Key, new Business Service Management benefits of BMC CONTROL-M include:

• Integrated, agent-based and agent-less data management across both mainframe and distributed systems, providing a comprehensive on-demand portrait of business data and processes, both batch and real-time;
• Focused systems management and control, enabling efficient business problem detection and resolution
• Elimination of the need for special security authorizations required by many government statutes and regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, further freeing up business and IT resources and providing quicker time to value; and
• Holistic, single-view management of all systems – including those previously considered inaccessible – resulting in significant reductions in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and the release of more resources for reinvestment or to support the bottom line.

As the volume and complexity of workload automation continues to skyrocket, with each Web-based transaction averaging more than 10 batch processes, the new agent-less capability provided by BMC CONTROL-M will be absolutely necessary if a business is to accurately understand its process and data flows. From accounting and order processing to inventory management and procurement, more than 50 percent of critical business operations are performed in batch environments.

Previous versions of BMC CONTROL-M have enjoyed a very loyal following among customers, and the new agent-less version was designed to dramatically broaden the installed base.  Today, more than 2,000 organizations have installed BMC CONTROL-M, the vast majority of which replaced an existing scheduling tool, and are leveraging the solution to meet Business Service Management (BSM) objectives. For some companies this means they now have insight into each employee’s desktop, allowing CIOs and IT staff to find and focus on problem areas that could impact the business.  Additionally, BMC’s agent-less capabilities leverage virtualization technology to reduce the number of servers an administrator needs to touch by as much as 80 percent, increasing service levels, speeding deployment and improving security.

“As an industry leader in the mail order and retail industry, we are always looking for ways to tie our IT investments to business benefit,” said Melodie Wilson, Business Administrator, L.L. Bean. “Our company prides itself on delivering superior customer service by maintaining service levels across our enterprise.  Utilizing BMC CONTROL-M for our daily enterprise batch processing provides us with the flexibility to run batch across various operating systems and simplify our processes with a single and easy-to-use interface.”

From an IT management standpoint, BMC CONTROL-M allows datacenter staff to place the entire spectrum of their IT infrastructure within their control and measurement.  They can schedule, submit, and monitor jobs on any platform with or without installing a remote agent, and manage systems previously deemed inaccessible due to security protocols, configuration processes or environmental resources.

“Job scheduling is no longer just an IT function; it is now a critical part of the business process,” said Bill Miller, vice president and general manager, Mainframe Service Management Business Unit, BMC Software. “In many instances, even a minor process defect can have major repercussions on business performance and customer satisfaction.  With the addition of agent-less monitoring, BMC CONTROL-M enables organizations to manage IT from a business perspective, increasing productivity and improving business revenue.  BMC CONTROL-M’s agent-less functionality and unified single-view console represent the best approach for the real-time enterprise.”

BMC’s Business Service Management Differentiator for Workload Automation
BMC CONTROL-M supports the company’s Business Service Management (BSM) strategy by helping customers better understand the relationship between real-time and batch processing environments and then managing those environments to assure on-time delivery of the business services they support.  Combining BMC CONTROL-M’s batch scheduling solution with BMC Batch Impact Manager provides a clear picture of the status of all batch business services and enables customers to proactively detect potential delays as well as errors in the batch process, so that corrective actions take place before the business service is affected. 

About BMC Software

BMC Software [NYSE:BMC] is a leading global provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage their IT infrastructure from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC solutions span enterprise systems, applications, databases and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC posted fiscal 2006 revenues of approximately $1.5 billion. For more information, visit www.bmc.com.