First and foremost, this looks like a very nice acquisition for BMC Software and clearly a market consolidation play. It secures over 13,000 SMB customers and establishes BMC as one of the leaders in the SMB IT Management market segment. The big win for BMC is in the client management space. The current BMC offerings coupled with some of the newer Numara offerings may allow BMC to offer a rich solution — as long as they can quickly execute on “best feature” integration and portfolio optimization. Working against BMC is the somewhat questionable reputation of software vendors to quickly and efficiently execute on these well laid and always well communicated plans.
Don’t Be Forced to Remedyforce
Numara does not have a SaaS based Service Desk offering. Hosted, yes — SaaS, no. And yet when one looks at the press release headline it appears that somehow the acquisition has added to BMC’s SaaS offering. Not true. BMC has a single SaaS offering for the SMB market — it is called Remedyforce, their Service Desk offering available on the Salesforce platform. BMC does not own a SaaS platform and is beholden to Salesforce to deliver any SaaS applications — perhaps an advantage, but a little strange for a $2B+ enterprise software vendor in today’s world, especially when the strategic relevance of SaaS to BMC is unquestioned.
As a result of the Numara acquisition, customers should be wary of the promises made. Can BMC really afford to provide excellent support and ongoing innovation across seven very different ITSM offerings? It is clear that all cannot win. BMC will likely use the newly acquired Numara customer base as a way to scale their Remedyforce installed base by forcing customers to migrate to the Remedyforce offering. However, customers will surely exercise their best judgement when faced with this challenge, and one can only believe that smart and informed customers will seize the opportunity to migrate to the best modern, multi-tenant SaaS offering, without being “forced” in one direction.
Confusing Service Management Product Portfolio
BMC has an opportunity to consolidate its leadership position in client management. However, the biggest challenge coming out of this acquisition is a deeply confusing BMC Service Desk product portfolio. It also does little to shed any light on BMC’s SaaS strategy. In fact, it has become a little more hazy.
Clearly, BMC sees this acquisition as important to its SaaS future — one only has to look at the press release sub-header to understand this. It is also very clear that BMC acknowledges that SaaS is here to stay and is a real threat to its vast (and now larger) on-premise base. The sub-header tells it all:
“Acquisition creates the industry’s most comprehensive set of SaaS and on-premise IT management solutions for the Global 100 to the smallest businesses”
Also important is that from a Service Desk perspective, this market consolidation play (taking BMC “down” into the SMB space) is not version one. In 2004, BMC acquired Magic, supposedly to do exactly that. What happened is that Magic (now called BMC Service Desk Express) and its maintenance base was allowed to atrophy, as customers moved away from a stagnant offering. Granted, some customers did move to Remedy, but that quickly became confusing as three flavors of Remedy emerged — classical on-premise Remedy, Remedy OnDemand (hosted) and the recently introduced Remedyforce Service Desk. The latter is supposedly the answer to the needs of the mid-market, but is a totally different code-base to the other two.
Numara Customers Have Better SaaS Options
We at SAManage look forward to the opportunity the new acquisition will present in the market. The SaaS disruption in the SMB Service Desk space, already underway, has just been substantially accelerated. Our successful Cloud for Clunkers program covers all of the Numara and BMC products and provides migration to SAManage at 80% of the customer’s annual maintenance cost. You will love using our service desk!
SAManage Cloud for Clunkers Program
Growing weary of your legacy on-premise IT service management tool? Tired of the high cost of ownership? The endless cycle of being forced to upgrade to newer releases with little value?
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Mike Gotts
