BMC Folds Storage Unit

BMC Software Inc. (NYSE: BMC) says it will discontinue the Patrol Storage Manager product line as it merges the storage business unit into its Enterprise Systems Management group.

BMC confirmed that it is phasing out Patrol Storage Manager (PSM), the company's flagship product for managing open systems storage.

"Our most recent version of PSM, version 2.2, will continue to be supported. However, the company has decided to curtail any future investments in PSM," says BMC spokesman Eric Krueger. "The company is evaluating how to best deploy the resources working on PSM onto other storage components or other projects." [Ed. note: By "resources," we think he means "people."]

The move by Houston-based BMC affects about 80 employees in its storage management software unit, sources tell Byte and Switch. "They have 30 days to find new jobs elsewhere in the company," says an industry source.

PSM is designed to provide an "application-oriented view" of a company's storage infrastructure, able to monitor storage arrays, Fibre Channel switches, and other devices. In 2001, BMC had 4.2 percent share of the storage software market (not counting array-based software), according to Gartner/Dataquest (see EMC, Veritas Both No. 1 in Software).BMC says it will continue to invest in Mainview Storage Resource Manager -- which provides capacity planning, performance optimization, and other features for OS/390 environments -- and will also continue to develop Patrol Knowledge Modules (KMs) for storage devices.

Krueger insists that "storage remains an important product line to BMC" and that the company believes storage is a "high-potential" growth area. But if that's true, discontinuing the main product in the category sure seems odd.

Word that BMC is pulling the plug on Patrol Storage Manager comes as competitors expand their presence in the market. Computer Associates International Inc. (CA) (NYSE: CA) last week bought SAN design startup Netreon Inc. and in January rolled out its first comprehensive SAN management package, BrightStor SAN Manager. IBM Tivoli, meanwhile, last summer acquired SRM startup TrelliSoft (see CA Nets Netreon, CA Spans Into SANs, and IBM Snaps Up TrelliSoft).

BMC was also taking steps to beef up its storage management offerings. Last year, for instance, it struck a licensing agreement with startup Invio Software Inc. and had planned to integrate Invio's provisioning technology into PSM. However, BMC appears now to have abandoned this development (see BMC OEMs From Invio