During the month of March, we celebrate International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month. “Inspire inclusion” is the International Women’s Day theme for 2024, and in honor of that, we surveyed members of the BMC Women in Technology and Business (WiT&B) employee resource group (ERG) about inclusion and mentorship. Establishing ERGs is a powerful way to foster open discussions and promote inclusion by creating safe spaces for employees to have open, authentic conversations, and the WiT&B ERG has had a significant impact on its members.

For Brianna Steensen, who manages the BMC Champion Academy sales training organization, it’s been integral to building a stronger and broader network. “I’ve made great connections with female leaders and have been able to tap their time and expertise for my program,” she shares. She also appreciates the support that comes with that, specifically, “seeing female leaders like myself being supported and promoted by others in the organization. Recognition for hard work goes a long way, even if it’s on a call or in an email.”

Gina Fevrier, a senior program manager in the Beta program at BMC, highlights communication as key ingredient of inclusion. “Inclusion, for me, means being listened to and being asked for my input during meetings. It’s about being invited to meetings, including lunch and extracurricular activities, and not feeling left out due to my gender,” she explains. “It’s being given opportunities to lead and participate in special projects. It’s being asked for my feedback on team, organizational, and corporate initiatives.”

Fevrier also appreciates the inclusion that the WiT&B ERG affords her as a remote worker. “I’ve liked our live webinars with internal and external speakers, like Carla Harris, who talk about their real-life experiences in their careers,” she says.

“I loved our book club, where a smaller group of us met on a monthly basis to talk about the books’ themes and how they relate to our lives. These smaller, non-recorded groups are really helpful to people like me who work from home and miss out on the “water cooler” and lunch conversations in the office. I like being kept up to date on women’s work issues and opportunities.”

Deepak Chopra, a senior manager of product development at BMC, says the ERG has helped broaden his understanding and awareness about issues related to inclusion, and where he can help foster discussions. “Inclusion is including anyone and everyone in [the] mainstream, everywhere, which can be home, community, workplace, etc. There is no reason not to follow inclusion,” he shares.

“I started becoming more vigilant towards inclusivity and making sure I remain supportive and help in this area. [Through the ERG I have] learned lots of best practices, which I am implementing in my day-to-day life.”

ERGs give their members a safe space for genuine dialogue, and Rebecca Beatty, a senior solution engineer at BMC, says that’s the very definition of inclusion for her. “Inclusion in the workplace means that I get to show up to work as my authentic self and be comfortable with it,” she explains. “[I have a] community of coworkers who I know I can reach out to for mentoring or advice, as well as [gain] access to information and meet new people.”

Sheila Mullen, a global strategic account manager at BMC, shares that inclusivity spans everything from elevating your presence where key business decisions are made to sharing and learning from diverse views, including, “celebrating our differences and actively learning about people who are different from you.”

She adds that the ERG helped her grow personally and professionally. “No matter what is going on in my world, every time I join a WiT&B call, I am energized, inspired, and in awe of the talented women at BMC. I leave the call knowing anything is possible,” she says. “Participating has allowed me to advocate for myself, be a sphere of influence in my piece of BMC, and positively support the promotion of women in the workplace.”

Rosie Huth, a global alliances manager at BMC, says inclusion is about “collaboration and mutual respect for your professional counterparts.” “No one has to prove why they should have a seat at the table because we are already here together,” she shares. “[With the ERG], I have built a community with professionals that span region, departments, and roles, which, by default, helps to foster a rich sense of inclusion across traditional silos.”

Each of the members also shared how mentorship relationships have been instrumental for them. “I have an incredible mentor at BMC! She is someone who listens, gives great advice, and continuously advocates for me,” says Steensen. “We’ve had crucial conversations about career trajectory and paths, which have helped shaped my own professional goals.”

Fevrier has had a mentor for two and a half years and been a mentor for two years, and both have been enriching experiences. “My mentor has helped me affirm my value at this time of my career where I’ve had some self-doubts, and she helped me rebuild my self-confidence. She has helped me with networking across the company, which has led to new opportunities at BMC that match my skills and interests,” she explains.

“As a mentor, I’ve been there to listen and provide career guidance. My mentee knows that she has a safe place to talk about her concerns. There have even been moments of reverse mentoring, which I’ve really appreciated. My mentee has been someone I could rely on for confidential discussions about any work issues and career advice.”

Chopra is also on both sides of mentoring, explaining. “I am mentoring individuals for their personal and professional growth, including their career and helping them in their day to day life.”

Beatty benefitted from mentoring earlier in her career, sharing. “[Years ago], I had the opportunity to complete a leadership training academy at a previous employer and be mentored by my then manager, who was also the only female leader in my organization.”

Mullen is both a mentor and mentee and she loves it. “I have mentored several women. I love to see them grow and progress in their careers. I have been mentored and supported by some amazing professionals in my career. Each one added to my professional toolbox. I am the woman I am today because of each of their gifts. I am truly fortunate and grateful,” she says.

“[As a mentee], I learned that I did not want to be a leader or manager, in a see-try-learn way, where I found out that my strong skillset and what motivated the best version of me was in the weeds working with customers versus leading a team of people who do that. I feel very fortune to have a supportive mentor willing to grow with me and help me figure out which direction I wanted to go, even if it wasn’t the same path they were on.”

Huth has enjoyed being a mentor, particularly for women transitioning into the tech sector. “I have had the absolute pleasure of mentoring professionals at BMC [to whom] I can transfer my knowledge, insights, and experiences,” she explains. “Especially where they have come from non-tech backgrounds or veterans. It has been a joy to help them recognize they have a fresh perspective to business discussions and the industry because it’s not all they have known. They don’t have to unlearn anything and their resiliency to adapt is what is most valuable.”

If you’re looking for ways to expand inclusion across your business, and build employee resource groups, check out our DEI blog series on these topics and more, and to learn more about International Women’s Day, visit www.internationalwomensday.com.

One of the market strengths for BMC is its longstanding commitment to collaborating with best-in-class independent software vendors (ISVs) that have the unique expertise, perspective, and customer relationships to empower both organizations to deliver innovative, market-leading solutions that neither could deliver on its own.

These collaborative efforts extend beyond simple marketing relationships to strategic partnerships that span product management, customer support, and research and development, fostering tightly integrated and continually tested and expanded solutions that leverage new technologies. BMC ISV partner Fusion Global Business Solutions is an IT service management and IT operations (ITSM and ITOps) solution provider that has been consulting on and implementing BMC solutions with BMC-certified staff and a 24×7 BMC support desk for over 20 years.

The solution: project and portfolio management

Project and portfolio management is an essential process for ITSM and ITOps teams. In today’s fast-paced and constantly evolving business environment, IT projects can be complex and challenging, involving multiple stakeholders and dependencies. Fusion served as a design partner for BMC Helix for Portfolio Management, bringing its expertise to help organizations better manage their IT projects and portfolios effectively.

The solution provides a structured approach that includes:

• Identifying and prioritizing IT assets and services based on their strategic importance, cost, and risk
• Ensuring that resources are allocated effectively
• Delivering projects on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards

By implementing BMC Helix for Portfolio Management, organizations can achieve their business objectives more effectively and efficiently and deliver value to their stakeholders and customers.

Figure 1. BMC Helix for Portfolio Management.

Figure 2. Service desk for business app users.

BMC welcomes the expertise and input of customers and partners like Fusion to help bring innovative solutions and greater value to our customers, which we discuss in greater detail in the video below.

Interested in partnering? Visit bmc.com/partners for more information.

The recent BMC Exchange customer event featured a terrific collection of informative sessions and discussions, and BMC was honored to present our longtime partner, CyberMAK, with the BMC Innovation Award in the Solutions Innovation category, the first time it’s been awarded to a BMC partner. Innovation is an important theme for us at BMC, so much so that we built an entire incubator for it with BMC Innovation Labs, a collection of purpose-built labs in India, Israel, the US, and around the world. And we’re putting our muscle behind it as we springboard exciting new technologies and bring new solutions to market.

Innovation at BMC and the power of co-innovation

At BMC, our partners are integral to our spirit of innovation. Together, we are developing innovative solutions that are scalable, secure, and enabled by unparalleled intelligence to help our customers grow top-line revenue, improve their bottom line, and gain a competitive advantage.

BMC Innovation Labs enables BMC and our partners to:

• Create, nurture, and test ideas for products or features
• Fail fast, fail safely, and keep iterating
• Experiment with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), machine learning (ML), BMC products, and more
• Accelerate our growth into line-of-business (LOB) applications

Leveraging our decades-long history of helping companies run more efficiently, we’re always focused on innovating better solutions for our customers.

BMC and CyberMAK

With over 25 years of experience serving BMC and more than 150 customers across the US and EMEA, CyberMAK is an elite BMC design partner, and the first BMC partner to achieve the status of BMC Innovation Preferred Partner. The BMC Innovation Preferred Partners program is powered by BMC Innovation Labs and brings together customers, partners, and employees to deliver a digital-first future through accelerated solution development. The program takes advantage of the robust BMC partnership ecosystem to help support all aspects of innovation, and scale solutions across operations and IT and bring them to market.

BMC Helix for Customer Service Management

One such solution is BMC Helix for Customer Service Management, developed by BMC and CyberMAK and with 16 years of customer-centric, industry-specific knowledge built in. It serves several existing customers and is integral to BMC’s vision of enterprise-wide service management.

BMC Helix for Customer Service Management also aligns with the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, BMC’s business framework for future success, and one of its tenets, the Transcendent Customer Experience, which is about serving the customer when, where, and how they want to be served. Customer loyalty begins and ends with customer service that is personalized, engaging, proactive, intelligent, and, most of all, effective. Doing this requires a comprehensive, collaborative approach that aggregates data and derives value from every customer touchpoint and system.

BMC Helix for Customer Service Management gives organizations a differentiating factor for identifying service improvements, creating brand loyalty, getting a larger share of a customer’s wallet spend, lowering customer attrition, and providing a distinct advantage in customer experience and management. It seamlessly integrates into BMC Helix ITSM for a comprehensive, enterprise-wide service management offering and has numerous integrations into front-end and back-end customer systems of record.

The end-to-end service management suite aggregates data from various customer touchpoints and those systems of record to yield a wide range of valuable customer insights, enabling IT and operations teams to work together to deliver a personalized customer experience focused on service excellence for business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and government-to-citizen (G2C) engagements.

BMC Helix for Customer Service Management also supports omni-channel interactions for complaints, requests, suggestions, inquiries, and other interactions while managing fulfillment in conjunction with other departments and LOBs across the organization.

The customer service market is growing—forecasted by Grand View Research to reach $57.9 billion by the end of last year and $157.6 billion in 2030—and BMC Helix for Customer Service Management is well-positioned to tap into it as demand grows for automated customer engagement, improved scope of digital operations, and enhanced customer experiences and services.

In this video, I chat with Sam Lakkundi, Vice President of Innovation at BMC, and Tasnim Pithapurwala, Chief Technology Officer at CyberMAK, about our co-innovations.

To learn more about the BMC and CyberMAK partnership, check out this video. To learn more about BMC partnership programs, visit bmc.com/partners. To watch on-demand replays of the sessions from BMC Exchange, visit exchange.bmc.com.

To succeed now and in the future, every organization, regardless of industry, must evolve to become a technology-driven company. As they adapt to keep up with the rapid pace of change, digital transformation is key, and partners have a vital role to play.

According to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, digital transformation efforts are expected “to reach $1.78 trillion [and] the role of presales—also known as sales engineering, solution architecture, solution consulting, and system engineering—has become more important…Presales professionals are directly responsible for technical discovery, presentation, product demonstration, solutions development, and evaluation management—so much so that the sales team increasingly relies on presales to drive this highly technical phase of the sales process, and to do so much earlier than before.”

Trends in Partners Presales

As resellers of portfolios that include software, services, and hardware, partners have their own brand identity in the market. When a vendor has a large portfolio, a partner wants to support the customer across multiple solutions, so getting a partner to focus on the software piece can be a complex challenge.

BMC’s partnerships help our customers evolve to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise across five key technology-enabled trends: Transcendent Customer Experience, Automation Everywhere, Enterprise DevOps, Data-Driven Business, and Adaptive Cybersecurity. We are also transforming our own business at the same time as our customers and our value-added resellers.

At BMC, we enable our partners with demand generation, marketing, and most importantly, comprehensive solutions. Presales is a highly valued organization that now includes the formal Value and Solution Engineering (VSE) group, which has over 400 contributors and managers worldwide. Presales is aligned not just to the sales organization but also shares technical knowledge and is a connective tissue with our BMC partners in a supporting role when necessary.

The BMC presales teams ensure that the business value of a proposed solution’s technical capabilities is clearly defined and articulated at every step of the customer’s transformational journey. Working with cross-functional leaders from solutions marketing, product management, development, services, and sales, they ensure these solutions deliver value both for the customer and BMC.

A Game-Changing Resource

The role of sales is also undergoing an evolution. “As customers research solutions for themselves—rather than trust the word of the salesperson throughout the buying process—the role of the salesperson has shifted from representation of features and function to more assurance that the right team of SMEs are brought into the conversation,” says ITA Group. It’s therefore more important than ever to educate partners at the presales stage so that they understand the solutions they’re selling and can communicate thoroughly with customers.

To scale and grow the partner program and help partners learn by “teaching them to fish,” BMC implemented a game-changing presales application. The tool is dedicated to making our partners successful by focusing on the partner’s presales role and delivering instruction in the way people learn best—through practical experience—supported by direct engineers who offer expertise but allow the channel partners to handle it directly.

The easy-to-use application is accessible through a dedicated presales landing page and offers content and best practices as well as:

1. A self-service skills assessment built on BMC Helix that allows partners to record their current level of knowledge for each solution, set goals, and assign priorities for the enablement needed
2. Recommended learning paths for technical and soft skills, listing all the content, including demos, that they need to achieve the required level of knowledge
3. Access to demo enablement assets, including pre-created demo videos, click-through presentations, and scripts to learn how to demo BMC technology, plus support from a center of excellence and BMC Support and the ability to request demo enhancements based on customer feedback

Cleber Souza, a senior sales engineer with BMC partner Online Business Systems, found the resource extremely helpful. “Being able to tell the right story to each prospect and deliver quality demos are crucial to drive opportunities to a positive outcome,” he says. “The BMC presales application supports our activities by providing us access to the required technical resources, pre-canned user stories, and enablement we need to get the job done.”

Conclusion

In today’s economy, the value of presales has become clearer and gives both BMC and BMC partners additional opportunities to grow revenue as we and our customers evolve to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Learn more about our BMC presales application from our conversation below.

The pandemic has accelerated and transformed organizations across every industry, including the tech sector, driving innovation across all of them. Innovation is a key differentiator for BMC and our partners, and the BMC Innovation Labs foster innovation by encouraging employees, customers, and partners to work together to create, nurture, and test new ideas and implement pilots to bring new products to market.

In today’s highly competitive and fast-paced business environment, it is becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to keep up with the pace of technological change and single-handedly do everything at an optimal level. In many cases, businesses are turning to digital solutions experts and tech partners to help accelerate digital innovation.

BMC has worked with our partners to form an innovation ecosystem that delivers compelling value to our customers on their journey to becoming an Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE). That ecosystem includes a diverse mix of industries and organizations dedicated to servicing our end user customers and providing competitive differentiation with unique value-added services, innovations, and selling into vertical markets. By co-innovating with BMC and its partners, organizations can share resources and insights into evolving market and industry trends and reduce risks while collectively developing intuitive products, services, and solutions that benefit everyone.

A $250 billion opportunity

In 2020 and 2021, BMC has been recognized by CRN’s “Edge Computing 100” list of technology vendors that are providing the building blocks for channel partners to assemble unique edge solutions. And edge is a massive market. According to a recent Worldwide Edge Spending Guide from IDC, “the worldwide edge computing market will reach $250.6 billion in 2024 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5 percent over the 2019–2024 forecast period.”

The guide also points to services (including professional and provisioned services) accounting for 46.2 percent of edge spending in 2024, followed by 32 percent for hardware and 21.6 percent for edge-related software.

CRN points out the importance of partners, saying, “partners time and again prove themselves to be masters of not only adapting to new market conditions and trends, but often foreseeing them, presciently moving their businesses to where the proverbial puck is going, not where it is right now. It comes as no surprise, then, that many in the channel are embracing the prospects created by the rise of the intelligent edge [by] building solutions that bring data collection and processing close to where it’s needed most.”

BMC’s One Partner Program—Innovation

Our BMC partners are building out new solutions that help customers migrate their on-premises solutions to cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. To support this transition, we needed to grow our programs to support those partners willing to make the innovation journey with BMC.

With a focus on co-innovation, BMC is now beginning to formally work with our ecosystem of partners to:

• Foster new customer alliances
• Develop a futuristic solution
• Promote cooperation among industries
• Enable agility for innovation within organizations
• Share risks, costs, and validation of best practices

Collaborating with our partners brings in new perspectives and skills that enable enterprises to anticipate and cater to their customers’ needs faster. In a co-innovation model, customers are involved throughout the process, as are all stakeholders. Real-time feedback during development ensures a richer value proposition for every development and co-creates value that benefits the product, the consumer, the organization and, ultimately, the bottom line.

Our BMC partners have always been innovators, but the BMC Innovation Labs provides the environment and support to co-innovate solutions that support customer requirements for our BMC solutions, and their creativity and ability to customize solutions has changed the game. I recently chatted with BMC’s Sam Lakkundi, VP of innovation, to discuss our co-innovation and the opportunity it creates for our partners. Here’s that conversation.

Conclusion

We have purpose-built BMC Innovation Labs in India, Israel, the United States, and other locations across the globe where we’re designing scalable, secure, and innovative solutions. Enabled by unparalleled intelligence and supported by our industry-leading customer success programs, we are building solutions and partnerships that create an impact across the enterprise.

To learn more about becoming an innovation preferred partners, email partner_innovate@bmc.com.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions have ascended rapidly, never more so than in the last year and a half when much of the world adopted a remote model of working. Companies migrating to a SaaS model are yielding a range of benefits, including rapid deployment, reduced support requirements, improved flexibility, and lower costs, and BMC and our partners are making this journey together. We’ve made SaaS subscriptions part of our partner program, beginning with the BMC Helix family of products.

The subscription model is the way forward for technology, and at BMC, our channel partners are integral to that success. A recent Forbes Tech Council article explains that, “in channel partnerships, the sales and distribution channel is the enabler for the model to work. These partners own the customer relationships; they have the intimate knowledge of their clients; and they can add tremendous value through their services and know-how.”

When migrating to SaaS solutions, our customers are navigating significant process changes and learning new technical skills—and the same holds true for our partners. “The customer transition to a subscription model has accelerated into overdrive in the last four years…[moving from], ‘why should we move to subscription’ to ‘tell me why we shouldn’t.’ For the channel, this creates a number of issues, not [the] least [of which is] revenue recognition rules, cashflow, and a different type of services engagement with the client,” says John Mohan, CEO of BMC partner Global Fusion.

Having a strong partner program like the award-winning BMC Partner Advantage Program is essential. In addition to financially rewarding partners who make the move to a subscription model with a rich rebate program that maximizes the margin on SaaS transactions, it also helps them upskill their personnel to meet the needs of customers and build stronger relationships with them. With the full power of BMC behind them, our partners are agile enough to meet sudden changes and able to customize solutions for specific customer requirements.

The FY22 Partner Program rewards partners for reselling subscriptions and provides a number of resources:

• PREP 7.0: Partner readiness education packages help minimize the partner’s investment in the technical resources they need to implement SaaS by providing up-front rebates for passed certifications.
• SaaS deal registrations: The registrations reward partners twice—first with an incremental, additional discount to their partner discount and then, upon closing, with a rebate so they can maximize their margin on the transaction.
• New logo (customer) rewards: Partners can receive extra rebates for bringing new logo customers (who have no spend rate in the business unit during the previous 24 months, including with the parent company) to BMC.
• Year-over-year growth bonus: Top-tier partners are awarded a bonus at the end of the year for growing their SaaS business.
• Business Investment Fund (BIF): The BIF provides partners with access to funds to help accelerate their business growth through demo environments, service assurance packs, and education (LPCs) to increase the sales of BMC subscriptions and services to new and existing customers.

Don’t just take our word for it. Our partners agree with the strength of SaaS and the BMC partner program. “BMC has a subscriptions-first based approach to accelerated growth and customer satisfaction [with] recognition given to the channel by BMC, which makes this happen quicker and more efficiently,” explains Global Fusion’s Mohan.

“Incremental channel discount plans and flexible payment schemes all help to facilitate the transition across the great on-premises to subscription divide. In addition, net new subscription sales (the Holy Grail as we say) are rewarded with additional incentives and ease of doing business. This open ecosystem created by BMC and the channel working in harmony is key to customer, channel, and BMC success.”

Learn more about the flexibility and choice of the BMC Partner Program to help you align your business model to meet your customers’ strategic needs at bmc.com/partners.

As the business landscape continues to evolve in real-time, companies are urgently trying to evolve along with it. At BMC, we call this evolution to a digital world the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, where technology, and specifically emerging technology such as automation, is integrated into every facet of the business. One of the tenets of that evolution is delivering a Transcendent Customer Experience that anticipates and adapts to customer needs. Our partners are critical to our ability to do that successfully.

As part of our commitment to consistently deliver an optimal, end-to-end, always-on, customer-centric experience, the BMC Partner Program engages an ecosystem of more than 600 worldwide partners to extend the reach of our solutions, provide additional services, and increase the value to our customers.

Building the relationship

At BMC, our partner programs formalize our relationship with partners and encourage them to sell, deploy, and recommend our products and services. To best serve our customers’ strategic requirements, we offer partner agreements that are beneficial to all parties.

As a solution provider to 84 percent of the Forbes Global 100 companies, BMC brings a revenue-rich portfolio of digital enterprise solutions, world-class training programs, sales and marketing incentives with attractive margins, and business management support. We also empower our partners with the tools and resources to grow and succeed, including sales training, technical certification through BMC’s PREP 7.0 program, strategic planning, and more.

The changing marketplace

Our programs recognize that market transformation is ongoing, and we serve clients across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. As the industry transforms, so do our partnerships, aligning to BMC’s core initiatives of bringing our product groups together with a continued focus on moving to software as a service (SaaS).

We’re in the second year of a multi-year transformation to a global and local indirect go-to-market (GTM) approach. The global program drives the overall program approach, where we collaborate with our regional teams and valued partners to work toward creating a Transcendent Customer Experience.

Award-winning partnerships

In May 2021, we launched our updated BMC Partner Advantage Program, which, for the 16^th year in a row, was designated a five-star CRN Partner Program winner. The award recognizes leading technology companies’ most distinguished partner programs that offer solution providers the best of the best and go above and beyond.

BMC continuously looks for opportunities to help our partners grow, and we are doubling down on the partner experience by streamlining the training required to achieve solution badges, providing greater access to solutions content, and enabling future transparency and tracking.

Conclusion

We’re committed to our partner community, and the BMC Partner Program is a critical component of BMC’s GTM strategy as we help our customers evolve to become an Autonomous Digital Enterprise. Learn more at https://www.bmc.com/partners. In future posts, we’ll explore our individual partner programs.

As we enter the month of March, the beginning of Women’s History Month in the US, and celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th, it’s the perfect time to look at the importance of mentors and sponsors for women in career development.

Did you know that Pew Research counts 37 women in Fortune 500 CEO roles, an all-time high of 7.4 percent last year? And McKinsey reports that women in senior vice president positions grew from 23 to 28 percent while C-suite representation grew from 17 to 21 percent? But today, women hold just 38 percent of entry-level management positions versus 62 percent for men. Additionally, for every 100 men promoted, only 85 women—and 58 Black and 71 Latina women—are promoted.

Corporate leaders all attest to the importance of finding the right allies and supporters for career growth and progression. And for women in the workplace, finding the right mentors and sponsors can make all the difference. As Callie Babbitt, associate professor of sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology, said in an interview with w2.0, “Women face cultural and institutional barriers to advancement that are easier to identify when there is a critical mass of people willing to discuss the hard issues, and easier to surmount when there is an accessible network of supportive peer mentors and allies.”

What are they?

A mentor is someone who talks with you and supports your professional and personal development. Carla Harris, vice chairman and managing director at Morgan Stanley, put it this way in her TEDTalk, “A mentor’s job is to give you tailored advice, tailored specifically to you and to your career aspirations. They’re the ones who give you the good, the bad, and the ugly in a no-holds-barred way.” It’s important to note, too, that a mentor should not be in contact with your manager unless that was agreed upon—and you gave permission—early in the conversation.

A sponsor, on the other hand, is someone who talks about you, and without whom you cannot survive in your career. Harris says there are three key criteria that a sponsor must have:

• A seat at the decision-making table
• Exposure to your work in order to have credibility behind closed doors
• Power

“This person is carrying your paper into the room…spending their valuable political and social capital on you…is going to pound the table on your behalf…has your best interests at heart and has the power to get it, whatever it is for you, done behind closed doors,” she adds.

My own story

Over the course of my career, I’ve had many different mentors, and each time I selected a mentor, I looked for individuals who could support me when I took risks and with whom I could openly discuss my career, goals, plans, and aspirations. Most important to me was finding a mentor in whom I could confide without worrying about the information getting out into the organization.

My mentor matches were always dependent on my focus and career needs, and my mentor and I owned the relationship. Together, we determined the right cadence, agenda, and talking points of our interactions to make them impactful and beneficial.

Finding the right sponsor may not always be a part of your career development conversations, and it can take a bit of work to find the right one. As explained above, a sponsor is an advocate who can work the room on your behalf and generate concrete, positive outcomes for your career. When I was searching for a sponsor, I had to do my homework to find the right individuals who knew my work and had seats at the table.

One of my key learnings during this process was to have conversations about my achievements and where I wanted to go in the organization. Being both transparent and authentic in these conversations and simply asking for what I wanted was a bit scary, but I found individuals who were willing to help.

Supporting career growth at BMC

BMC has empowered teams around the world to create opportunities for mentoring and sponsorship. We see the strength in our people who embody our values of Prioritize People and Do the Right Thing. Our Sales group matches employees with mentors and sponsors; we have an established mentoring program in India; and our internal Women in Technology and Business employee group takes a casual approach to mentoring, helping mentors and mentees get connected.

And this month in particular, I’m especially proud to work for a company that has these wonderful programs in place to help advance the careers and professions of women. It’s essential that we understand each other and help each other grow because the Autonomous Digital Enterprise—the future state businesses must achieve to compete and thrive in the future—includes everyone.

Time to get started

This year, International Women’s Day has a theme of #ChooseToChallenge, which is the perfect opportunity for you to find your mentor and sponsor for the next year, start your development journey, and explore the learnings that you gain. And perhaps, someday, you can pay that forward by becoming a mentor or sponsor, too.