So Long

This is my last blog entry, because I have elected to leave BMC Software and continue my career with another software company.  This was a difficult decision – I greatly enjoyed my 5+ years with BMC, and especially the last 2 years helping launch the Software-as-a-Service / Managed Services business unit.  A while back, someone told me I appeared to have the best job in BMC and that might well have been true.  In any case, I will miss BMC and they might miss me a little too :^).  I believe BMC has a bright future, and hope to stay in touch with all the great people (colleagues, customers, partners and others) I got to know at BMC.

My new position is with Sterling Commerce in Dublin, Ohio, where I am now the VP of product management for the B2B Collaboration product line.  If you don’t know Sterling, check out our pitch at www.stercomm.com.  I am really excited to work in a different part of the software universe – to see the industry and customer needs from a different perspective -- and especially to work for a company that is a strong and recognized leader in its space (as BMC is in its space). 

Sterling and BMC are similar in many ways, and different in many ways.  The similarities are a bit scary – war stories that sound exactly the same except for the names of the products; people in the same job function who appear to have the same personality (even the same name!) as their counterpart at the other company; successful products; large numbers of happy customers; and plans to change and grow in significant ways.  The biggest differences have to do with the markets each company serves – BMC’s goal is to optimize complex IT systems (people, process and technology) to provide the greatest business benefit; Sterling’s goal is to help customers and their trading partners maximize business performance by optimizing complex data exchange and process interactions (like supply chain and other information coordination challenges) both within and between enterprises. 

There are a lot of similarities between systems management and B2B collaboration, and I have been thinking about lessons learned in one space that may apply in the other.  Do the ITIL processes that Service Management solutions are based on resemble a process framework for the (internal or external) “IT supply chain”?  Might multi-enterprise collaboration tools or even true supply chain apps apply here – to enable IT services delivered and coordinated among multiple providers?  The big problem for IT asset management solutions and CMDBs (how to arrive at an accurate “single source of truth” describing IT assets) has a lot in common with the Global Data Synch problem retail supply chains deal with every day.  Identity management and trading partner management seem very similar; so do distributed database recovery and supply chain disaster recovery.  Why do IT assets (even software) not have “barcodes” (so to speak)?  Or maybe shipping containers should have MAC addresses.  Both companies even use the phrase “Business Impact Management” or BIM – at Sterling, this means analyzing the impact on a business or supply chain of a delay or failure of one “link” in the chain; at BMC this means analyzing the impact on an application or extended business service of a performance problem or outage of one IT node / element.  Maybe IT is just one flavor of the B2B or supply chain problem space … as Mark Stabler might say, “This is interesting”. 

Best wishes and best of luck to all my friends at BMC.  In this big / small industry, we will probably meet again.  If you are ever in Columbus, I will buy you a bowl of chili entirely different than you can get in Texas :^).  I hope to have my Sterling blog humming soon.  You can contact me at chris_johnson@stercomm.com.

A new blog on the same topic will be started on TalkBMC by Jay Gardner.  Wiley Vasquez will also start a blog focused on the technology behind on demand software.  Enjoy those.  Thanks!