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BMC Unifies Database Tools
Hoping to better reflect the current data management environment, BMC Software, Inc. unified its database products and business units. In addition, it launched new products for IBM Corp.'s DB2 database.
Few, if any, enterprises run a single flavor of database today. Oracle may be used for one project, while another uses DB2 or SQL Server. Combined with the staff reductions in the poor economy, database administrators may be called on to manage a database outside their core competency. By unifying its database management products, BMC hopes to address this issue by offering DBAs a consistent interface and feature set for managing all major database servers.
Before the reorganization, database products were segmented by platform within BMC. One team worked on Oracle, while another team designed tools for DB2. Moving the staff into a single organization gives them the opportunity to collaborate for consistency within the products. Eventually, BMC will offer the products as a suite, and packages supporting particular database flavors will snap into a single overreaching management application.
While many enterprises use tools sold by database vendors themselves, BMC believes a universal database management product will gain traction because of the cross-vendor support.
Moreover, BMC is Web-ifying its SmartDBA tools, to allow DBAs to access the tools from any machine within the organization. Tim Muting, director of product marketing at BMC, says this will help administrators who need to change offices when working on a database in a different department. "It gives them a lot of flexibility," he says.
The first products to arise out of BMC's new strategy target DB2 UDB, which Muting says is the fastest growing database platform. SmartDBA is a performance tuning and administration product which snaps into BMC's SmartDBA Cockpit, a portal for monitoring and managing databases. DBXray is a diagnostic and visualization tool that helps administrators check the health of a database. Finally, Space Expert provides administrators information on what DB2 objects can be resized or moved for optimum performance.
BMC plans to roll out new versions of these products for each of the major database platforms this year.