LAS VEGAS—BMC Chairman and CEO Bob Beauchamp kicked off his company’s annual conference here Sept. 7 with a colorful analysis of the rapid changes taking place in technology in general and the enterprise specifically.
The keynote for the Engage ’16 conference also featured several product announcements from the enterprise software firm.
“The number of new technologies coming together and the potential disruption to industries is unprecedented,” said Beauchamp, noting such advances as the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, bots, virtual reality, the mobile internet and autonomous vehicles.
He said one of the reasons Internet giants such as Amazon and Uber succeed is because they aren’t complacent. For example, he quoted the CEO of Uber as stating he’s worried if his company doesn’t become a leader in autonomous vehicles, its fast-growing ride-sharing business will be at risk. Uber has, in fact, invested heavily in autonomous vehicle research.
“Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon says he’s sure Amazon is going to be Amazoned; he just doesn’t know when,” added Beauchamp.
Blockchain Could Eventually Be a Game-Changer
One potential technology game-changer is the distributed database technology known as blockchain. Beauchamp noted that 50 of the world’s largest banks and tech heavyweights including Microsoft and Google are researching blockchain.
Blockchain is basically a distributed database that uses a secure digital ledger of transactions that users can share across a computer network. “It has the potential to completely redesign how we do transactions if it takes off, though I don’t know if it will,” said Beauchamp.
Finally, he noted that many essential computer technologies are being rewritten by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence changing everything from customer service to anticipating security threats.
Beauchamp said a new kind of “hyper-agile digital enterprise” is needed to deal effectively with all the technology advances that continue to emerge. He emphasized it’s not just about adopting technology, but redesigning how companies relate to customers, their supply chain, partners and their employees.
“If you don’t do that, you don’t change the culture,” said Beauchamp.
BMC Connects Legacy to New-Gen IT
A specific challenge BMC’s own products seek to address is connecting legacy products and infrastructure to newer technologies.
“Whatever the infrastructure is today, it will change in the next three years,” said Beauchamp. He suggested the role of the CIO is going to grow as he or she will be—and in many cases is already—charged with making everything work, from the in-house mainframe to newer cloud services.
He recommended an IT management structure becomes an accelerator for innovation rather than a detriment that favors the status quo.
In the case of BMC itself, Beauchamp said the company has listened very closely to what its employees say they need to do their jobs more effectively. A top request was strong search capability. “We blew up search,” Beauchamp said in describing how the company redesigned the technology.
An interesting offshoot of that research was that it made a lot more information accessible—and BMC discovered that not all of it was secure or where it should be. The kind of blessing-in-disguise result was that BMC invested in reorganizing and cleaning out a lot of its content and made what was left easier to find.
Innovation Studio, Control-M and Security Extensions
On the product news front, BMC announced the cloud-based Innovation Studio suite for developers that is currently undergoing beta tests. It initially will be offered for free on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is part of a new BMC developer program.
“This new suite empowers business users and enterprise developers to accelerate digital apps and services getting to market through agile app development,” said Robin Purohit, group president for BMC Enterprise Solutions Organization.
BMC also announced new capabilities to its Control-M application workload automation platform, which now features more unified and efficiently managed file transfers, optimized rapid cloud deployment for AWS and Microsoft Azure and a new automation API with expanded ‘Jobs-as-Code’ capabilities for DevOps teams.
The Control-M Managed File Transfer product provides one operational dashboard for consolidated, end-to-end visibility into the status of file transfers and business application workloads to increase efficiency and control of business services.
Simplifying File Transfer Functions
According to the company, Control-M Managed File Transfer eliminates the need to integrate multiple file transfer systems or to manually script or trace transfers across multiple applications to resolve issues.
BMC also announced extensions of its BladeLogic Threat Director security applications, which are designed to help organizations deal with two big security challenges—finding blind spots and isolated processes.
The new integration with BMC Discovery, an enterprise data management system that automates discovery of assets in the data center, which allows for the rapid identification of unsecured assets and provides critical visibility into application dependencies, making it easier for IT managers to anticipate the impact of actions on end users.
Integration with BMC’s BladeLogic Network Automation solution promises to accelerate and scale security operations, cutting off known vulnerabilities for both servers and networks, according to company officials.