BrainBlog for BMC by Jason Bloomberg
A small team of former Shell Oil employees founded BMC Software in 1980, focusing on software for mainframe computers.
In the intervening four decades, BMC expanded its focus to include distributed systems as it completed dozens of acquisitions. The company went public in 1988 and subsequently private again in 2013. Global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) acquired the company in 2018.
Given this rich history and commensurate established customer base – including continuing expertise in the mainframe marketplace – one might jump to the conclusion that BMC might struggle with ongoing innovation.
Under the auspices of CEO Ayman Sayed, however, innovation is a strategic priority for the venerable vendor. While much of BMC’s innovation takes place behind the scenes, it presents a public face to its efforts: the BMC Innovation Labs.
Realizing the Vision for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise
One of Sayed’s first initiatives at BMC was to call for the development of the vision for the Autonomous Digital Enterprise (ADE).
The ADE is a framework for how customers can leverage technology to compete in an increasingly disruptive future. The ADE contains five technology tenets: Transcendent Customer Experience, Automation Everywhere, Enterprise DevOps, Data-Driven Business, and Adaptive Cybersecurity.
While the ADE lays out a high-level roadmap for customer success, BMC’s own product capabilities depended on collaboration with a broad partner ecosystem. The company had the courage to lay out anaspirational yet necessary vision with the confidence they would get there over time.
This gap between vision and reality is what drives innovation at BMC. Sayed set a difficult but not impossible goal for the company – a goal that innovation alone would help BMC achieve.
Traditional software research and development, while necessary, would never be sufficient to achieve such audacious goals. The company needed to step up its innovation game – and the BMC Innovation Labs were born.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
