BMC: New SDK Goes Out On Patrol

The new Performance Manager SDK is free software that can walk partners through a wizard-driven setup of Performance Manager or offer an intuitive interface that provides a range of native scripts for performing custom installs, said Sean Duclaux, director of product management at BMC, Houston.

Performance Manager is replacing BMC&s Patrol and Patrol Express network management products, which were decommissioned in May and will be merged into a single billing architecture by December.

Some partners have already migrated their Patrol customers to Performance Manager, and BMC will host a partner enablement workshop in October to devise a set of best practices for migrating the more than 1,000 customers still using it, said Lori Cook, vice president of global services, channels and emerging markets. SDK will be a factor in the transition.

SDK excels in collecting as many devices as possible to be monitored, said Duclaux. And Performance Manager&s lighter-weight agents should enable partners to sell monitoring deeper into customer environments—into print servers and other places where the heavier Patrol agents would have been overkill, he said. Replacing Patrol, and the less expensive Patrol Express, with a single product won&t reduce opportunities for partners, said Duclaux.

To that point, Kevin Johnson, founder and president of Seamless Technologies, a Morristown, N.J.-based BMC partner, said that although SDK&s setup wizard cuts the time needed to deploy Performance Manager, the reduction in billable hours shouldn&t cut into professional services revenue.

The sooner Seamless Technologies can complete a Performance Manager setup, the sooner it can get on to more lucrative tasks, Johnson said. BMC is focusing on partner profitability, said Cook, adding that the company aims to double partner revenue over the next year.