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BMC, an IT industry survivor that sees itself as a bridge from the mainframe era of the 1980s to the on-demand/big data era of 2016, announced a long-planned change at the top Dec. 12.
Peter Leav, a former CEO of Polycom, joins the company as president and chief executive officer and succeeds Bob Beauchamp, who will continue to serve as chairman of the board of directors and play a key role in the transition.
Beauchamp served in the job for 16 years, leading BMC to new markets and record sales levels, despite the ebb and flow of the IT business in general. He took the company private in September 2013.
“We’ve been experiencing double-digit growth in both business units, all major product lines are growing, and more new products are coming out all the time. So a lot of things are going up and to the right,” Beauchamp told eWEEK. “Now that we have the company in a very strong position, the board and I thought it was the right time to bring in a new CEO to take us to the next level for the many chapters ahead—the next decade.”
“Fortunately for us, Peter came on the market. We’ve known about him for a while, and we’re thrilled to have him.”
Led Polycom for Three Years
Prior to joining BMC, Leav, 45, was president and CEO of Polycom, a global, $1.2 billion enterprise collaboration business built around voice IP, for three years. Previously, he was president of industry and field operations at NCR Corporation, one of the world’s largest consumer-transaction IT providers. At Motorola Inc., Leav was corporate vice president and general manager of the enterprise business in North America, Latin America and EMEA.
Earlier in his career, Leav held executive sales leadership positions at Symbol Technologies, Cisco Systems and Tektronix Inc. He is a graduate of Lehigh University and a member of the board of directors for HD Supply Inc.
Most often, when a company is acquired by a private equity firm, the focus goes to the bottom line, to the detriment of investment in innovation. Not so with BMC, Leav said.
“In this case, there has been substantive investment, and it’s been very deliberate,” Leav told eWEEK. “That’s not just hyperbole, that’s data. The R&D as a percentage has gone up since the company’s gone private, and so has the investment in new solutions.
“For me, it’s very exciting to understand the vision around digital enterprise management. I always look at things from the vantage point of: What is that enterprise customer interested in doing? Can we help them do it? How do we help them transition? And there are a multitude of ways our business is helping that happen.”
Going Private Hasn’t Hurt BMC’s Investments in R&D
Since going private in September 2013, 36-year-old BMC has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into higher growth research and development and go-to-market initiatives to address the digital disruption that is taking place in industries around the globe, Beauchamp said.
In 2015, the company introduced its strategy in Digital Enterprise Management, which provides users with a set of innovative IT tools designed to make the most of the digital business transformation.
BMC is one of the leading providers of software that enables enterprises to manage data and workflows from mainframes to distributed IT systems effectively, and then put that data to work in virtually any type of enterprise system.
BMC digital IT customers comprise 82 percent of the Fortune 500, and its products are used by more than 10,000 customers worldwide.