BMC detailed its Business Service Management strategy in early April, a strategy to which its recent acquisitions of Remedy and IT Masters are critical. Then at BMC’s annual analyst event in late May, it became clear that BSM is a lot more than a passing thought.

BMC in March acquired IT Masters and its MasterCell software, which targets automated event management with strong capabilities for modeling infrastructure components to match business services. This followed the acquisition of Remedy in November, whose software has service desk, problem management and asset management capabilities.

Business Service Management has become a unifying vision across the entire BMC portfolio - which includes mainframe management, database management and distributed management across applications, systems and networks.

There are good reasons to believe BMC can deliver on this vision, and do so in a unique and compelling way. I am more than willing to state this now, although when I went to the event, I had some serious concerns about integration, automation and ease of use across a complex and potentially unwieldy portfolio of products.

Another concern, perhaps less well addressed at the conference, was the lack of a fully evolved network management vision. Here the term “vision” is important, because BMC’s acquisition of Perform SA two years ago brought it two products (Visualis and Dashboard) that are rich in capabilities for autodiscovery (including discovery of virtual LAN service paths), performance, optimization and some event management.

Though BMC is eloquent, when pressed, in characterizing the strengths of its network management products, what BMC has so far not done is articulate a fully fleshed-out vision for managing a network as an integrated part of an application service - through its own products and through partners - from LAN to WAN to wireless.

Now having said that - let’s get down to why BMC has a credible play at creating something that the world seems to be clamoring for - a truly next-generation “unframework.”

Perhaps the single most outstanding strength, if BMC fully capitalizes on it - is the fact that Remedy and MasterCell (now called “Service Impact Manager”) are already designed to support a wide variety of other management vendor products.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.