Saturday, March 08, 2014

Location, location, location - Why I Joined BMC

The enterprise software market is not that different than the real estate market - where you are positioned in the market is everything.

In the nerdier-than-thou Bay Area, moving from VMware to BMC is not the most obvious move, so here are some of my thoughts on my decision.

At this point, I have started 2 companies (Persistence, Medaid), gone public once (PRSW - never again!), sold 3 companies (Persistence, WaveMaker, Reportive) and led one spinout (Pivotal).

Figuring out what to do next was a challenge.

I had always felt that in evaluating a job, team comes first and opportunity comes second (or in Jim Collins-speak, first who, then what).

When I was first introduced to BMC, I spoke to Eric Yau and was impressed by his vision about transforming BMC — I felt it was very similar to the transformation project I had worked on at VMware. As I met with other BMC executives, I was struck by the overall quality of the executives and their commitment to make BMC the leader in the cloud and automation management.

I believe that BMC has a unique position in the cloud space because they are not tied to a particular cloud platform. The other key players in the space - VMware, Amazon, Microsoft - all have a dog in the fight. They *care* which underlying platform their cloud automation manages.

In short, the other production-class cloud managers are focused on building a purebred cloud backed by their OS or hypervisor - only BMC has a singular focus on hybrid cloud.

If a key reason to move to cloud is greater customer choice, those same customers will be looking for the “Switzerland of cloud managers” to preserve their choice.

Time will tell, but so far I am thrilled with both the market opportunity in front of BMC and the collaborative culture within BMC.