History 2003: BMC Throws in Towel Patrol Storage Manager

BMC Software has decided to discontinue its flagship storage software, Patrol Storage Manager (PSM), which more or less dooms its enterprise storage management division, and will lead to some hundred lay-offs in USA and Europe.

What’s behind this unexpected blow, when PSM, one of the rare application-oriented storage management software titles, was so highly regarded?

Storage Guru Jon Toigo, who knows the product well and rather appreciated it, offered the following theories in one of his recent pieces:

• product took too long to sell,
• it wasn’t “channel friendly,”
• product had a few flaws, and
• no one anticipated storage management software revenues would be so low industry-wide.

Jean-Michel Guillou, BMC’s EMEA field marketing SRM director, who is among those slated for lay-off, provided an additional reason: “It would have required a lot of money to sustain the product, particularly in order to move forward with qualification for all the hardware products on the market.”

Why, then, didn’t BMC find a buyer for PSM?

According to Guillou, “It was too invested in Patrol.”

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 182 on March 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.