Greg Bukowski, Technology Solutions Director, BMC Software & Simon Blanks, Area Vice President, BMC Software virtually connect with Lisa Martin for AWS re:Invent 2020 with Specialized Programming of the Partner Network Day. #theCUBE #reInvent #AWS https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/03/qa-bmc-helps-customers-navigate-tricky-pandemic-waters-solutions-data-centers-cloud-reinvent/ Q&A: BMC helps customers navigate tricky pandemic waters through solutions for data centers on the cloud BY TERYN O'BRIEN BMC Software Inc. is a 40-year-old company with over 6,000 employees that helps 93% of the Global 1000 enterprises manage their IT infrastructures. In this incredible year living through a pandemic, BMC has been in the thick of helping enterprises navigate an extremely challenging year as they moved data to cloud technologies like Amazon Web Services. Looking toward the future, BMC believes this initial huge transition to the cloud is just the tip of the iceberg. Simon Blanks (pictured, right), area vice president of sales at BMC, and Greg Bukowski (pictured, left), strategic chief technology officer at BMC, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the pandemic challenges they saw with customers, what customers want moving to the cloud and other future challenges. (* Disclosure below.) [Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.] The last year has been incredibly challenging and brought on a lot of challenges and opportunities. Talk to me about how that has impacted BMC’s customers. Blanks: Our customers are wanting to simplify. They’re wanting to focus on what makes them win … and get away from the things that … are not the competitive advantage. We see a lot of customers wanting to get out of the day-to-day operation of the data centers and migrate to the world of AWS, but it’s not as easy as we would all like it. There’s lots of challenges. One of the largest areas of challenges we see that they are having to address is manage these millions of IT assets — that are constantly changing, and some of them they don’t even know exist — and moving those to AWS, but moving them quickly, securely and, of course, in a cost-effective manner. Have you seen an acceleration of those customers wanting to move workloads to AWS when the pandemic started and every business had to suddenly send workforces home? Is that something that you’ve seen speed up the last few months? Blanks: It’s not only gained in velocity, but will continue. We don’t think that some of these changes to how a business is conducted are going to stop once the vaccine comes out. The complexity of making this happen, you know it’s difficult, especially in some of the very large organizations — be it banks or telecoms or manufacturers or retailers. It’s not an easy chore, and … we’ve experienced some great wins in that area and helping some of our most strategic customers make that happen. So Greg, talk to me about the BMC solutions. What are some of the BMC solutions that you recommended AWS consulting partners consider to help customers, especially as you’re seeing more and more migrations to AWS? Bukowski: It’s a big concern for customers, but the realization of how they’re going to operationalize themselves and still be a tech-driven company and tech-driven organization has really accelerated their digital transformation, and it’s driven more than anything the adoption of cloud technologies. And to move into that cloud space, it’s brought about understanding customers — how did they become more digital? And to do that, they have to connect their services … BMC has an industry-leading solution. It’s called [BMC Helix Discovery], and it automatically goes within an organization’s footprint and understands the dependencies between their infrastructure and their applications. So have you automated what used to be a traditionally manual, lengthy process? Bukowski: That is the key point. When partners look to us for what value we can bring to them, it’s about accelerating that time — all about reducing the time through automation, what used to be a manual effort of understanding how these things connect and being able to talk to the application teams. ... Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: BMC Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither BMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)