BMC takes the service desk offering on-demand with Salesforce.com
So finally one of the Big 4 – BMC Software has taken their service desk offering to the cloud. BMC Software announced this strategic alliance at Dreamforce 2009, Salesforce.com’s premier cloud-computing event. This new alliance will help BMC put its IT management solutions on the Force.com platform.
Not Remedy
BMC is planning to put the Service Desk Express application on Force.com and will deliver cloud-enabled service desk, self-service and inventory management capabilities.
BMC mentioned that it is currently scheduled to be available in the second quarter of calendar year 2010. This is interesting because Microsoft is also planning to release their version of the service desk technology sometime in 2010.
New Beginnings
This announcement among others at Dreamforce 2009 is a new beginning for both Salesforce.com and BMC Software. Salesforce.com has been trying to tell its client base that it is not a CRM company and with vendors like BMC and CA, it is able to provide a set of enterprise apps on the cloud. This will help BMC Software move away from its traditional software delivery method to the cloud.
Pricing for the new service has not been revealed yet.
Interesting Times Ahead
It will be interesting to see how this new service from one of the Big4 fares with established service-desk-on-demand players like Service-now.com and Zendesk. HP and CA have on-demand versions of the service desk technology too. What do you think?
Now that all the BMC giddiness has had a chance to die down, here’s the reality.
The term “strategic alliance” is silly, especially in this case. For Salesforce.com this was a new customer win for the Force.com PaaS. BMC needed a SaaS play, was out of options, and was already really late to the game. So BMC took an expendable brand in Service Desk Express are working to put it on Force.com and are finally giving SaaS a shot.
This has nothing to do with enterprise IT service management. SDE on Force.com is a rudimentary help desk ticketing tool for small businesses that will try to compete with really slick, modern SaaS apps like Beetil and Zendesk. Even Salesforce.com has a call center app, Service Cloud, that can be considered competitive to BMC.
BMC SDE on Force.com will probably be adopted by small businesses later this year, but it will significantly miss the mark as a savior for the BMC Enterprise Service Management business and the Remedy product line.
My blog post “BMC Reaches for the Cloud” goes into more detail on the topic.
Rhett
Service-now.com
@rglauser
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