Suhas Kelkar, the chief technology officer for BMC in this region, said that it might in the future be possible to point a smartphone camera at a server in the data centre and instantly see server statistics on the display of the phone, which could identify hot spots or servers which were running low on capacity.

He said that the company was also interested to explore game dynamics, and how they could be used to influence user behaviour in the enterprise IT department. 'Imagine creating a competition to show who was resolving the most issues or performing a certain action you want them to do.

'If someone comes across an intelligent solution they should add it to the knowledge base. But hardly anyone does it.

'But what if you gamify the system and reward people for doing that,' he said.

Mr Kelkar said that the purpose of the two incubators - which are home to about 25 researchers - was to 'Stay ahead of the rest of the organisation and identify the trends that will shape enterprise software in two to four years.' This might include analysing the impact of cloud computing, or consumerisation, or how social media will seep into enterprise computer systems.

He offered the example of how it might be possible in the future to allow employees to use their own smartphones to take a photo of an error message on their screen and then use that to create and send an incident report.

Some of the ideas from the incubators are starting to emerge in products. BMC is already planning to integrate social media into the next release of its products from Remedy to Cloud Lifecycle Management that will allow tweets about service requests to be issued, or incident tickets to be created from within a chat window.