Well, there’s now some meat behind the announcement of a new three year makeover plan for Compuware. Dubbed Compuware 2.0, the CEO announced the intention to re-brand his company. I questioned whether the new Compuware 2.0 play would mean a more improved focus on Business Service Management. Based on some of the recent (ex)employee(?) comments on my blog, things aren’t all peachy in Compuware 2.0 land.

The COO stated Vantage was key to their new strategy and that more more investments in the Vantage suite to “further distance themselves from the competition”. Now the big question is where would those investments be? Resource monitoring, service monitoring, user experience monitoring, transaction monitoring, BSM?

Launch site:

http://www.wemakeitrockaroundtheworld.com/en/

Of interest:

http://www.motorcityrocks.com/2008/05/comuware-employeees-to-recive-gift-of.htm
http://www.wwj.com/pages/2196498.php?
http://www.businessreviewonline.com/blog/archives/2008/05/#000663
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080516/BIZ/805160344
http://detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080517/BIZ/805170345

One of the goals is to “establish a communications protocol that’s consistent and transparent” appears as a blog. One post, only from the COO at this point and the feeds didn’t work for me. I’d like to see product managers, developers and delivery services folks active and encouraged to discuss how they’re going to adopt Compuware 2.0 in their products. How they’re going to enable Business Service Management and ultimately alignment between business and IT. Heck, the doors open for you to join the conversation on my blog here and share on these topics anytime, just ask!

BMC’s CTO Tom Bishop responds to Michael Biddick’s Information Week Article and adds to the conversation.

The article also makes an incorrect generalization by suggesting that smaller vendors do a better job of “playing well with others.” BMC – a charter member of the ‘Big Four’ management vendors – provides solutions that operate well in heterogeneous environments and integrate with the broadest range of technologies possible. This allows organizations to utilize current IT investments instead of replacing and beginning anew. As we tell our customers every day, a correct implementation of BMC’s BSM strategy makes our competitor products better. This is a fundamental difference between BMC and our competitors.

One of the biggest challenges I see personally, am asked by clients and integrators constantly, and see a very large amount of traffic headed to my blog from Google searches is around integration difficulties with the BMC Atrium CMDB. I’d like to invite Tom or some of his team to respond and share more about how client’s investments in other vendor technology and products can be improved, simplified or even realized when they desire to leverage the powerful information in the Atrium CMDB, especially complex service relationships and CI information.

I’m aware of the new(ish) Atrium Integration Engine, but I’m pretty sure we (IBM Tivloli) are not exploiting it in any way formally. Can we get a discussion going or information out there in the BMCDN or other place on integrating BMC Atrium with core IBM Tivoli products. Put the bad blood aside, let’s do it for the customers!