BMC Software Introduces Performance Manager, Promises Agentless APM

On May 23rd, BMC announced the integration of Patrol Express, its agentless offering with Patrol and rebranded the new product Performance Manager. This is both an extremely significant move on the part of BMC, and the extension of a marketing position to a new level of spin. The significance of this move lies in the fact that smaller infrastructure management vendors sporting agentless offerings (and even some large ones like Mercury with SiteScope) have been putting tremendous pressure upon the large incumbent vendors like BMC, IBM/Tivoli, CA, HP, and NetIQ. The pitch on the part of the agentless crowd has been that they can do between 80% and 100% of what the agent-based vendors can do, but with significantly reduced licensing costs, and (more importantly) significantly reduced complexity in terms of deployment and maintenance of the software solution. The agentless crowd has even has some notable successes in getting enterprises to unplug their complex agent-based enterprise management frameworks, and replace them with the simpler and cheaper agentless offerings. Mercury in particular has been very aggressive in going after large enterprises with a pitch that is based upon SiteScope licensing costs for less than the recurring maintenance charges for the incumbent enterprise frameworks. So, BMC (and the others will follow) had to do something if for no other reason that to protect its customer base.

The first significant effect of the move to agentless technology on the part of the infrastructure management vendors will be that it will sharpen the distinction between vendors who provide infrastructure management (management of the hardware, the network, the OS, and the middleware layers), and vendors who provide application management (or Application Performance Management). As the infrastructure management vendors become agentless, it will become clearer and clearer that they are not managing applications, nor are they managing or assuring the performance of applications. This will create enormous opportunities for the vendors who deliver real application management solutions to gain traction, as it will create room in the market for these solutions. It will also create some technical room for the applications management vendors, which they sorely need, since true management of applications and applications performance requires that an agent be present on the server. So, getting rid of a marginally valuable agent that monitors CPU utilization and disk space, creates room for a more useful agent that that actually helps manage the performance and availability of applications.

Now for the part about the increase in spin from BMC. If going agentless means that Patrol will become less useful in terms of managing applications performance you have to wonder what the marketing folks at BMC were thinking when they named the new offering Performance Manager. Seems like they picked the one name that evokes the exact opposite of where the product is actually going. Just goes to show you that marketing and reality continue to bear no resemblance to one another (at least at BMC).

Bernd Harzog
CEO
APM Experts
Bernd.Harzog@apmexperts.com