There's quite a bit happening in network management and monitoring this week, with players large and small unveiling their latest product lines, upgrades and corporate news at Interop in Las Vegas. Here's a sample of what's being rolled out by vendors:
BMC Software on Tuesday announced several new products and enhancements to its Business Service Management (BSM) offerings. On Monday, Avocent continued its push beyond its core KVM switch line with the introduction of remote management of its DSView 3 IT infrastructure management platform by handheld device, plus tighter integration with HP OpenView, NetClarity, Uptime Devices and LANDesk Server Manager.
Also on Monday, San Francisco-based Splunk rolled out version 3.0 of its search engine for logs and IT data, while SolarWinds and Neon Software get the prize for most jam-packed announcement with the news that the former has acquired the latter, which in turn has released a brand new version of its LANsurveyor product.
BMC's new offering provides "much tighter integration and process maturity" for tools built around Performance Manager and other core BMC platforms, said CTO Tom Bishop.
New products released by the Houston, Texas-based enterprise management software provider include BMC Transaction Management Root Cause Analysis and BMC Performance Assurance/Performance Exception Detector, as well as CMDB support for Performance Manager and the new Performance Assurance platform.
The offering also includes new releases of the vendor's Performance Manager, Transaction Management Application Response Time, Event Manager and Service Level Management solutions.
"We believe the ideal approach to managing IT is that it should be done from the perspective of the business. What organizations told us is that they simply didn't want a set of tools that made one side of the house better but didn't integrate with systems on the business side," said Bishop.
BMC elite partner Column Technologies, an infrastructure management consultant and solution provider headquartered in New York, values the vendor for its investment in the channel as much as for its technology, said Column principal Rob Yario.
"The key to BMC's appeal is that they provide long-term contracts, offer front-line support to develop service contracts and they're an innovative company coming out with good products. We do joint marketing events and joint sales calls. We can develop products on their platforms and sell them on their own or with BMC," said Yario.
BMC partners can apply for marketing funds from the vendor to match 2 percent to 3 percent of sales, Yario said, pointing to Column's annual Borgata Event in Atlantic City, N.J., as an example of how lavish such joint marketing efforts can be.
BMC also hoped to highlight additions made to its Partner Network Program over the past year, said Lori Cook, VP of worldwide professional services and channels.
She said BMC's sales and technology training programs for channel partners grew out of internal BMC training for new employees.
"We had created some sales assistance for our new badged BMC employees, but about 18 months ago we invited select partners to attend. Now those sessions are made up of about 75 percent partners and 25 percent badged BMC employees. They're all in the same room, it's the same training for the partners as it is for the internal staff," Cook said.
Erin Shvetzoff, a sales executive for BMC premier partner Meritide in Minneapolis, Minn., said her "personal sales more than doubled" after attending BMC Sales Foundation training last January in Houston.
"After Sales Foundation, I was able to articulate the business value more effectively. I could bring it to the next level beyond just discussing feature-slash-function," Shvetzoff said.
Other additions to BMC's Partner Network Program include a BSM-certification process similar to the original BMC certification, a more nimble hosted sales demo and the addition of an "Elite" tier to its partnerships which affords access to pre-beta versions of new products.
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