“Our biggest competitor is the BMC of 2009-11 – the BMC of old that was mainly a mainframe-focused business,” said chief executive Bob Beauchamp.

I was a guest of BMC at its ENGAGE 2016 Conference attended by more than 2000 delegates and business partners who were in Las Vegas for three days to attend more than 300 technical sessions, 90 customer sessions and participate in the innovation zone trade display.

The audience was about 50/50 suits and nerds (referring to their attire and the odd propeller head cap), but it was 100% focused on the future directions of the company and its largely new software.

I interviewed Beauchamp who spoke of the three major reinventions that the 36-year-old company has been through and the relevance of the last major change. BMC went “private” in 2013 and has spent the past three years designing not only new software for new computing paradigms (the shift to the cloud, mobility, and apps) but also planning for what the company should be. Then building that software and organisational structure, and in year three — now — executing the vision.

So in '101' style here is a brief overview of what BMC does.

BMC provides essential tools for managing computing environments including:

Service Management – ITSSM (IT service support management tools), ITIL v3 (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

Remedy Service Management Suite is a mobile-first digital enterprise management platform built for boosting workforce productivity. It makes complex IT simple. In its most basic form it is about service desk management – keeping the IT infrastructure working, answering user questions, and extend well past that.

Workload automation

Control-M is a digital enterprise management solution that simplifies and automates diverse batch application workloads while reducing failure rates, improving SLAs, and accelerating application deployment. It has versions for Hadoop, Self Service, Managed File Transfer, SAP, and much more.

IT operations

TrueSight Operations Management delivers end-to-end performance monitoring and event management. It helps IT operations teams correlate, analyze, and prioritize event data to focus on business-critical issues.

BladeLogic Server Automation,  one of BMC's digital enterprise management solutions, allows you to quickly and securely provision, configure, patch, and maintain physical, virtual, and cloud servers.

Cloud management

Cloud management platform drives digital innovation with agile, full-stack service provisioning across cloud and traditional platforms. BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management scales easily while integrating with essential compliance and governance policies to reduce risk. Integrates with MyIT to offer a single service catalogue for all IT offerings including cloud. Integrates with TrueSight Capacity Optimization and TrueSight Operations Management to help IT deliver fast, reliable cloud services. Intelligent analytics offer better visibility and control – improving performance, optimising resource usage, and reducing cloud costs.

IT automation

BladeLogic Threat Director provides IT operations and security teams the data they need to prioritise and remediate threats based on potential impact to the business.

BladeLogic Database Automation helps database operations teams to provision, patch, configure, and maintain databases in a fully automated fashion.

Discovery automates asset discovery and application dependency mapping to build a holistic view of all your data centre assets and the relationships between them.

Mainframe

While its heritage was the mainframe, this now accounts for about 25% of the business. There are about 2000 (mainly IBM) mainframes left in the world used by

• Healthcare
• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Public Sector
• Telecom
• Finance

About 91% of consumer-facing apps still touch a mainframe computer somewhere. These “legacy” systems will be around for many years as they fulfil specific purposes and could not be easily replaced with cloud computing. But they need to integrate into the world of mobility and apps — loosely called digital transformation — and BMC has the tools to integrate, and reduce costs of mainframe management.

It announced the free Innovations Suite to develop SmartApps by creating server side extensions using Java, new responsive Web clients using Javascript and AngularJS, and construct customisable definitions to enable code-free Tailoring. What was once Forms, Filters, Active Links, and Plugins in Developer Studio has been updated to use modern and common development practices.

BMC have established a separate entity to focus on mainframes.

MainView gives the power to diagnose problems, minimise risk, and cut costs.

So it is on with reporting from this event.