BMC Channel Chief Pledges Increased Support

Cook, who joined BMC from IBM three months ago, said the Houston-based company has already reorganized its services division -- focusing its services team on large-scale projects and pushing all other pending services contracts to its partners.

"When I got there, services had 1,600 open contracts and was doing everything," said Cook. "We scaled services down to focus on large complex opportunities, and moved the rest to the channel."

BMC partners are feeling the increase in opportunities from the vendor, said Randy Sebastian, operations manager at dbaDirect, a BMC partner in Florence, Ky. Since Cook's arrival, the pipeline of BMC contracts running to dbaDirect is fatter than ever before, said Sebastian, who added that several big contracts are already about to close. "We are seeing the biggest amount of activity we have ever seen from [BMC]," said Sebastian.

Cook in her new role has responsibility for services, channel partners and emerging markets. BMC defines emerging markets as all customers except 47 strategic customers and 1,900 enterprise customers.

In the first quarter, 70 percent of emerging markets revenue came through the channel, compared to 20 percent for the same quarter a year prior, Cook said. Last year, the emerging markets segment accounted for 11 percent of BMC's total revenue. "My goal is to have 90 percent of the revenue we get from emerging markets come through the channel," she said.

On average, Cook said BMC gets 30 percent of its emerging market revenue through the channel, 8 percent of its strategic partner revenue from the channel and 50 percent to 60 percent of its enterprise revenue from the channel.

"BMC did not do a good job of defining the roles their partners play and then providing them the support and infrastructure they needed to be successful," she admitted. "But BMC can no longer afford to grow the way it has historically, where it relied on its mainframe business. The world is changing and our partners are changing. We can't grow without our partners."

As part of that effort BMC will place more emphasis on its SMB products, which include its Remedy and Magic software product lines. Additionally, BMC plans to add password automation tools to its Magic help desk software offering, said Cook.

"We've really reenergized the Magic solution," she said.

DAN NEEL contributed to this report.