BMC Polishes Partner Training Program

The BSM program is a new initiative that even current BMC resellers and professional service partners must qualify for, said William Donahoo, director of worldwide channel program development and marketing at BMC, Houston.

The reward for BSM-certified partners is a greater opportunity to get their hands on lucrative BMC professional service revenue by offering more, or all, of BMC's broad infrastructure, application, and business IT services product line, Donahoo said.

In August, BMC pledged to try to drive most or all of its customers' professional services needs through VARs.

"If you are an existing BMC partner, you are not a BSM-certified partner," said Donahoo. "We are now saying, 'Become a BSM-certified partner.' And our existing partner management team is going out into the field and saying, 'If you have or know partners that have these [BSM-level] skills, nominate them for the partner program.' "

The BSM certification program takes qualified resellers from the level of their current BMC product expertise and grows that expertise across as many BMC product lines as possible, said Donahoo. For example, a BMC partner that currently specializes in selling and servicing the vendor's Remedy product would be trained and graduated upward along a line of training to sell and service more complex BMC products such as Batch Impact Manager. But it makes no difference at what skill level a qualified reseller starts, said Donahoo. "The incentive to flesh out expertise on the stack is the same."

The BSM certification levels start at infrastructure management, where partners master the deployment of IT device monitoring technology such as BMC's Patrol, Patrol Express, Enterprise performance assurance, Control-SA, Mainview and Control M&D. IT application management comes next--where application management is mastered with products such as Patrol for SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems. Then comes IT service management, at which partners can align IT solutions to business-critical needs using products such as Patrol Event Manager and Remedy.

Service Impact Management follows as the level where BMC partners have mastered IT automation and the deployment of products such as Batch Impact Manager. Then at the top is BMC's business services, the highest level of professional IT services, which reflects an applied knowledge of BMC's process consulting, ITIL and business process re-engineering services, Donahoo said.

"What we are looking for initially are partners that have proven skills in enterprise management, IT service management and process consulting, the ability to link the IT process with the business process," said Donahoo.

BMC has designed what it calls solution ladders, which are subcategories of its overall technology product offering, to simplify the process of learning new BMC product skills. A BSM Overview Course is also being offered. The free, half-day course gives solution providers an overview of BMC's product offering "so a partner who understands one component of the BSM skill set sees how it fits into the overall BMC stack," said Donahoo. "A Patrol Express partner can use the overview see how he can upsell and cross-sell of the whole BMC solution stack. It's a great way for them to grow their business."

Joe Blomker, president of Maryville Technologies, a VAR in St. Louis, is the first systems integrator to achieve BMC's BSM-certified recognition before the course was announced publicly.

"The vision of Business Service Management is realized with Maryville's ITRO delivery methodology and integration expertise, providing customers what they need to reach IT process excellence and business services alignment to maximize business performance," said Blomker in a statement.

BMC officially launches the certification program Thursday at BMC Software's BSM event in New York.