Systems management vendor BMC Software Inc. will resell EMC Corp.s storage management software, and EMC has acquired the rights to BMCs defunct Patrol Storage Manager, officials from both companies said Wednesday.
The deal, long rumored, immediately gives EMC access to the approximately 50 customers who bought Patrol Storage Manager, officials said. Long-term, it gives EMC access to BMCs thousands of enterprise users, “a major advantage for us,” said Bill Nelson, senior vice president of open software operations, in Hopkinton, Mass.
BMC, in Houston, discontinued Patrol Storage Manager earlier this year, citing slow sales and limited resources.
“PSM does a very good job of doing file system and file-level reporting that we dont do as good a job in with ControlCenter,” and which EMC will integrate, said Bill Nelson, senior vice president of open software operations. But in areas like interoperability with the Common Information Model, BMC was “not that far along,” he said. EMC has its own
BMC retains the customers, but EMC will support them. The customers were all informed of the deal, Nelson said. “They havent found any of the customers that are looking to defect,” he asserted.
Representatives of BMC declined to identify any of those customers. However, one is Southern Company, the Atlanta energy utility. “We were just in the process of implementing it for the first time” when BMC cancelled Patrol Storage Manager, said Gail Commer, manager of enterprise solutions.
Southerns storage involves more than 100TB of EMCs Symmetrix and Clariion arrays, plus an older mainframe from Amdahl Corp., now part of Fujitsu Ltd. BMC was chosen for the software because of an existing relationship – and because of its hardware-agnostic approach. “Were a long-standing BMC customer and had always been pleased. Im very disappointed because from what I had seen and learned about the Patrol product itself, I was optimistic that it was going to meet our needs,” she said. “I would feel a lot worse if I already had it implemented in the field,” she added. Now, “Im going to let the dust settle. Were just going to go back and reevaluate where [ControlCenter] is going,” she said. “Its not the best move Ive ever seen made by a company, thats for sure,” she said.
Meanwhile, “Were looking to sign more software companies. Were still a big-ticket hardware company,” EMCs Nelson said. “You cant go into this environment and claim that youre heterogeneous and do it with one other vendor.”