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BMC Atrium CMDB Customers See Major Savings in I.T. Management Costs

(July 29, 2008)-- BMC Software announced results of a Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting, including BMC customer testimonials that demonstrate the cost savings and return on investment realized by implementing BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The recently completed study, titled "The Total Economic Impact of the BMC Atrium CMDB Solution," was commissioned by BMC and surveyed 26 BMC customers. Forrester used the input from these customers to create a sample composite organization to describe the potential benefits of the BMC Atrium CMDB, and found a cost savings and benefits of over $1.2 million and a lower level of risk when compared with the pre-implementation environment. One customer cited savings of $3.6 million in recovered revenue due to improved change processes with the BMC Atrium CMDB.

In the interviews conducted by Forrester, a number of key benefits were identified based on the implementation of the BMC Atrium CMDB:
-- Provide a service-oriented view of the IT infrastructure. The BMC Atrium CMDB lets the customer manage IT infrastructure based on what has the most impact on the business.
-- Make IT more responsive to business needs. Having centralized current information about configuration items within the BMC Atrium CMDB enables IT to make better planning decisions to respond to business needs.
-- Facilitate and accelerate the adoption of ITIL standards. The CMDB is an important component of adopting ITIL standards and views an effectively implemented CMDB as a prerequisite to ITIL standards adoption.
-- Share critical IT data across functions. As IT departments adopt processes that span IT functions, there is a need to share data about the infrastructure and the services IT supports.
-- Coordinate IT processes and automate them. With the BMC Atrium CMDB, IT organizations can use a more integrated approach with tools because they use common data, which makes it easier to use automated tools.
-- Facilitate compliance and audits. The BMC Atrium CMDB supports audits and compliance with government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC and HIPAA by providing control over critical changes, monitoring the history of those changes, and recording accesses to underlying data, applications and processes through federation to Access/Identity Management.
-- Reduce the impact of both planned and unplanned changes. The BMC Atrium CMDB, along with effective change and configuration management processes, enables management of the ever-increasing number of changes to the environment.
-- Make the service desk more efficient. IT service desk staff are able to significantly reduce the time and effort of providing IT service support by using the BMC Atrium CMDB as well as accelerating the successful resolution of support calls.

Prior to implementing BMC Atrium CMDB, customers managed their IT with a variety of disparate tools, each of which maintained its own independent data sets and logical views of the IT infrastructure. After the implementation, customers reported that numerous key business benefits, including easier integration of merged assets, support for growth initiatives by allowing revenue and productivity applications to be implemented faster, and improved business continuity and planning for backup sites.

Vodafone Australia, a subsidiary of Vodafone Group PLC, had understood for some time that their customers didn't care about the technology that underpins a specific business service -- they simply want to get the service they want when they want it. Delivering the innovative services and experiences demanded by their customers requires heavy synchronization and automation of infrastructural components connected to individual services. According to Vodafone, the key is managing systems and computing infrastructure in accordance with "a single source of truth."

"We needed to identify and understand IT and technology elements of individual services. Transparency and automation are the new agenda," said Matthew Massoud Nasrabadi, director of OSS strategy and planning for Vodafone Australia. "We wanted to move away from systems that didn't relate well. We knew that a tightly integrated suite of products would deliver enormous efficiency. We decided on the BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, including the BMC Atrium CMDB, because it offered the suite of products we required and also extended to services and assets."

Vodafone Australia's results are typical of what BMC is seeing across its larger customer base.
To view the full text of the Forrester study, please visit: http://www.bmc.com/teicmdb.
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