CIOIN

In January, BMC said that its Remedy IT Service Management (ITSM) Suite would be available to customers in a SaaS form. The company also tied up in November last year with enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce.com to host and offer BMC Service Desk Express, a service desk application. Salesforce.com is offering the software from its Force.com cloud computing platform.

Some of the new SaaS services will be offered through Salesforce.com, while others will be offered directly by the company, said Paul Avenant , senior vice president of products and strategy for Enterprise Service Management at BMC.

The tie-up with Salesforce.com has given BMC access to a larger number of new customers, Avenant said.

Avenant did not disclose which other products would be offered by the company on a SaaS model.

A sub-set of new customers and its current customer base want to buy their software in a SaaS model, and BMC wants to be ready for this opportunity, he said.

A number of BMC's service-provider partners already deliver SaaS services around its software, Avenant said. While some of them will continue to offer their services, others have decided to resell BMC's own SaaS offerings and wrap other services around these offerings, he added.

BMC also sees a business opportunity from telecommunications service providers who are moving fast to offer SaaS services to increase their revenues. "They are trying to set up a new business to drive new revenue, and they are trying to get there first", Avenant said.