Stories about: BMC

CA is expected to announce a product and services initiative titled "Mainframe 2.0" on Tuesday at its CA World 2008 conference in Las Vegas.

Scouts honor, the 98-year-old Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization is adopting open source software as a path to building better software that supports the almost 3 million scouts and 1.1 million adults who make up the group.

Aternity, a next-generation end-user experience management platform for enterprise IT, Tuesday joined the Red Hat ISV Partner Program as a Red Hat Ready Partner receiving access to the tools and resources necessary to develop and test Aternity's "frontline performance intelligence platform" on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Linux systems management start-up LinMin launched this week by making its first software product designed to ease the provisioning of Linux systems available for download.

Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, or FUD, is an old sword with a new blade in today's competitive IT world. If you cannot beat 'em, create controversy. But the old tactic is starting to lose its effectiveness.

Since the dawn of the business network, there has been a need to ensure that the network services provided to the enterprise are alive and responsive. Traditionally, in midsized businesses, this role has been filled by complex, closed source, and fantastically expensive solutions from manufacturers such as BMC, CA, HP, and IBM. And while these extravagant expenses make no customer happy, many users of these packages also complain of their complexity. Enough administrators have spent enough time wrangling with their monitoring systems to make a lot of smart people imagine that there must be a better way.

At 36 years old, William Hurley has been involved in IT for more than half his life, starting after a car accident that left him badly injured. While recovering, he began hacking X-objects for MacroMind and later Macromedia Director in the open-source multimedia community, then went to work at Apple and IBM, where he was a master inventor and senior manager of targeted Internet applications. Later, he joined a string of start-ups, including Qlusters, where he was chief technology officer; Symbiot, where he was a co-founder and CTO; and HireStorm, where he was the founder and CTO. He has combined his love for open source with his longtime work in IT systems management, which he has pursued at BMC since joining the company in February. Hurley has a unique MO that makes him as comfortable in the boardroom as he is on the legendary long green skateboard he often uses to commute to work -- and to get around at open-source conferences.

Open source management software has become a viable alternative to commercial products, and a recent rash of partnerships proves it, analyst says.

One year ago, Network World highlighted 10 open source companies on the rise 10 open source companies on the rise in such diverse fields as storage, VOIP, systems management, virtualization and the use of software to aid disaster relief.

If you curse your "tier-one" IT management solution as too cumbersome, too complex, and too expensive, you're not alone. In arecent Gartner study that declares the "Big Four" -- BMC, CA, HP, and IBM -- increasingly vulnerable to SaaS (software as a service) and open source alternatives, surveyed users gave their vendors mostly C's and D's, and a good number of incompletes.

SpikeSource CEO Kim Polese is an industry veteran who was head of the Java team at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s and also founded "push" software company Marimba, which was eventually bought by business software company BMC Software. SpikeSource helps companies put together open source software stacks by testing and configuring open-source components. It is increasingly feeling competitive heat from big companies like Oracle and IBM, which are offering Linux services and support, as well as from smaller companies specializing in open-source applications and components.