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Adding a piece of process automation to its service management offerings, BMC announced yesterday that it has bought RealOps, a 50-person startup that provides IT process automation, traditionally known as run book automation.

By Tony Baer

The deal, closed immediately for an undisclosed amount, brings BMC together with a company that was already part of its partner program. RealOps had already built integrations to BMC’s Remedy Service Desk and Atrium CMDB, and is currently working on integration with the BMC Performance Manager (a.k.a., Patrol) on the monitoring side. Both companies got to know each other at roughly a dozen joint customer engagements.

RealOps provides a tool for automating routines for managing the data center. It’s a market primarily of small startups and acquisitions, including iConclude, which was acquired by Opsware, and Opalis, which remains independent. Or, in some cases, incumbents like IBM already have some of these capabilities (with Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator).

They are productizing and trying to make repeatable the automation scripts that systems admins have long written for running processes, such as provisioning new servers, taking a server down, reconfiguring logical partitions and so on. With emergence of ITIL, the goal has been to make the processes more consistent and repeatable, in much the way ERP and other enterprise applications did for back office processes.

RealOps integration with Remedy inserts a workflow that checks incoming trouble tickets, and automates remediation of problems that could be handled without human intervention, such as resetting a password or changing some configuration setting. Once the problem is resolved, RealOps updates the trouble ticket sent to Remedy.

Its integration with BMC’s Atrium CMDB automatically submits changes to configurations that are the result of a change that RealOps triggers. Under development is workflow integration with BMC Performance Manager, so that when a change is ordered, it can temporarily shut off the monitor so nuisance alarms are not generated.

Our View

IT process automation is becoming a must-have for IT service and infrastructure management providers. The impetus is ITIL, which has driven IT infrastructure groups to systematically implement their best practices when running the data center. ITIL, which became an overnight success after roughly a 15-year gestation, hit a chord with IT organizations that had to demonstrate that IT dollars are well spent.

And IT process automation is becoming a must have for the infrastructure management vendors that supply tools to manage the data center and manage delivery of service to the enterprise. BMC’s move is its answer to IBM, which already has a process orchestration pierce in its catalog.