BMC’s new local chief targets new local markets

BMC is bucking the trend among IT vendors, taking on new staff in Canberra to push into the government sector and embarking on a new customer acquisition strategy under the watch of new A/NZ chief, Gary Mitchell.

In one of his first interviews since taking the job in October, Mitchell outlined his ambitious growth strategy for the vendor, which specialises in the business service management (BSM) and IT management space.

Among the key changes, Mitchell will look further outside BMC’s customer base to grow the business and to new vertical markets as well, including the government sector.

“We’ve been growing at around 20 percent per annum over the last few years,” Mitchell told iTnews.

“A lot of that growth has come from a fairly core base of BMC customers, so while we’ve got a lot of good customers getting good benefits from the tools, there are many other organisations we haven’t really [engaged with].”

He continued: “Our main focus has been financial services and telcos but we haven’t really talked to government agencies at all.

“We also haven’t really been proactive in bringing the BladeLogic technology we acquired back in April into the Australian marketplace.”

BMC has hired four new people in its Canberra office to focus on the government space, Mitchell said.

He anticipated future growth would be a combination of selling the last few pieces of end-to-end BSM into its existing customer base and through the acquisition of completely new customers.

On face value, BMC’s strategy stands out from much of the vendor community who are operating under hiring freezes and looking predominately at retention and to grow existing accounts rather than spend money on new customer acquisition.

Mitchell said his focus since joining BMC is around positioning the vendor for growth in what he acknowledges will be ‘fairly challenging times’ for IT.

“My desire is to drive efficiencies into everything we do,” he said.

On the technology side, Mitchell said BMC will focus on enabling the management of physical and virtual environments.

“Virtualisation management is a big focus for us,” he said.

“Our strategy is to go deep [into the architecture], wide in terms of integrating both physical and virtual assets and to increase automation.”

Mitchell also flagged a push to build relationships with some of Australia’s home-grown outsourcers and systems integrators - the likes of Alphawest and Getronics, among others.

“We do a very good job in working with the large multinational outsourcers but haven’t focused as much as we should have on the home-grown firms,” explained Mitchell.

“I think there’s a lot of untapped potential out there at the moment.”

Mitchell is formerly of Enterasys and Computer Associates.