BMC Software, Inc. went private two years ago as the winds of change were buffeting vendors in the systems management realm. The 35-year-old maker of service management, data center automation, performance management, virtualization lifecycle management and cloud computing management software hasn’t faded quietly into the night, however. Under the leadership of Robert Beauchamp, it has hatched a strategy called Digital Enterprise Management that aims to help its enterprise customers become digital businesses. Like many other venerable software firms, however, BMC continues to be classified by many as a legacy mainframe vendor. SiliconANGLE spoke to Beauchamp, a 24-year BMC veteran, to get an update on its transformation.

Q: BMC has been around a long time, which isn’t necessarily a virtue these days. How do you respond to criticism that companies like yours solve yesterday’s problems?

A: The mainframe is only about 25 percent of our business, and we’ve had double-digit growth over the last two quarters in the other 75  percent. The one disadvantage of being a company as large as we are is that we drag the tail of slower growth products. But it doesn’t mean we can’t get at the leading edge of using the latest SaaS and mobile offerings.

Just a month ago our six millionth customer signed up for our MyIT mobile app. They’re using it to provision their own services. A few years ago we were almost entirely an on-premise company. We are increasingly a SaaS company.

Q: How is it different being a CEO of a private company?

A: We have private investors who encourage us to be aggressive in spending money and growing the company because they believe this space will be red hot. We’ve spent nine figures on R&D to create this new strategy. It is fantastic. I don’t think the company could have made as much progress as we have in the past two years if we weren’t private.

Q: What approach are you taking to open source?

A: It’s a huge part of our strategy. We can give customer the approach to manage everything from mainframe to open source, so they don’t suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Q: Describe your new Digital Enterprise Management blueprint.

A: Enterprises are committed to becoming more digital, but they have a legacy base to contend with. We’re bringing them a single way to manage through all those digital layers.

Q: So isn’t that just a legacy play?

A: I wouldn’t say that. One of our new products, TrueSight Pulse, runs on AWS. You can set it up in 15 minutes and manage millions of metrics a day. However, the big industrial companies are the sweet spot. These companies are struggling with how to manage, automate and make things self-service. We have relationships are with the largest 5,000 enterprises on earth. They trust us.

Q: What common threads to you hear from your conversations with CIOs?

A: I was in Europe recently talking to the IT head of one of the biggest banks in Europe. They’re pushing to support massive new amounts of volume while also cutting their budget. He said that he and his peers are all dealing with this pressure. IT’s not pressure to cut costs, but to invest more in new areas. The CFO is asking to drive costs out of the back end so as to spend more on innovation.

One of our customers, Vodafone, built an app store so that a manager that wants to onboard a new employee can do that with a mobile device. The employee can use the enterprise app store to onboard their ERP systems and even reserve conference rooms. They’re making their company a digital workplace.

Q: What’s their attitude toward the cloud?

A: It’s almost universally accepted that our customers are going to go with hybrid cloud and will run for a long time on a hybrid model. That creates management complexity that can be overwhelming if you don’t have the tools.

Q: What misperceptions about BMC are most bothersome?

A: Some people think of us as largely mainframe. While it’s an important part of the business because 90  percent of financial transactions today still go through a mainframe, it’s only about 25 percent of our company’s revenues.

Over the last two years we’ve become stronger and faster than ever. We’ve doubled the number of products we introduced in first half of this year over 2014 and we’ll do that again in the second half. We’re going to be known for innovation as we as we consider a path to IPO in the not-too-distant future.

Q: How do you see the current industry disruption playing out?

A: I don’t think you can generalize around companies that are big or have been around a long time. I think you have to look at the problems they solve. Most customers don’t throw out what they’ve got; they build on top of it. We give them a management environment that isn’t hard-wired to the infrastructure. We’re not stuck on a particularly layer. I think those who are stuck on a layer are at greater risk.

Photo by Public Domain Pictures via Pixabay.