BMC ups channel recruitment drive

Enterprise software vendor BMC wants more partners to help it drive into the identity and access management market.

Peter Skoufis, director of business development at BMC, said the US-listed vendor was developing an Australian channel. It has had current partners Agreon and Vectra for less than a year and formerly focused mainly on direct sales.

"I'd say we need about another three [resellers]," he said. "We're having discussions with a couple of companies, but we're interested in talking to people selling to the gaps."

Skoufis said BMC was particularly interested in partners that could help it fill holes in its geographical and solutions coverage. Victoria could do with a boost but a national reseller might also fit the bill, he said.

Agreon and Vectra were doing a good job so far but BMC wanted to grow its channel sales. It believed that, following a couple of acquisitions earlier this year, the vendor could attack solution directory management, identity and access management and Microsoft .NET opportunities more strongly, Skoufis said.

BMC had 15 identity management customers in Australia -- some with around 5000 seats, some with more like 700 -- but about 300 or 400 customers in total, Skoufis said.

The vendor was running a certification program over the next two or three months and seminars to assist its resellers, he said.

"We just think right now this is a hot space. We are seeing four or five tenders [around identity and access management] hitting our desk every month," Skoufis said. "We're looking at 25 percent growth coming from new customers ... in the next 12 months."

Cindy Sterling, global director for identity management at BMC, said the vendor's point of difference was its software's level of integration, which BMC claimed was better than that of comparable products from other vendors.

"We're moving down a path of having our customers address ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) processes," she said.

"[Also] we are using the products to help our customers address whatever particular pain point is most prominent for them at any one time. Every customer will deploy some aspect of the portfolio in a different sequence."

One pain point for many customers right now was compliance and another was risk and vulnerability management. Customers needed a flexible way to address those issues, Sterling added.