Press release:

BMC Software Delivers ‘Chart and Compass’ to Help IT Map the User Experience in the Cloud

• HealthMEDX Understands and Resolves End-User Pain
• Wayfair Builds Competitive Advantage with Customers

HOUSTON, July 25, 2012 – A poor user experience can kill businesses running customer-facing applications in the cloud. To complicate matters even more, typical user feedback such as “the application is running too slow” is not often specific enough to pinpoint and fix the problems before the business is impacted.

To help IT organizations deliver what end users want, BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) has created a “chart and compass” to quickly map and navigate the end-user experience. BMC End User Experience Management is a powerful solution that helps IT organizations rapidly diagnose and improve customer satisfaction rates. In the latest release, BMC has extended this powerful solution to include applications running in the cloud, with visibility from the end user all the way back to the code.

“End-user experience monitoring is a critical criterion of the interaction between the human, device, and customer facing software applications,” said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner. “While this criterion is only one part of a complete application performance monitoring strategy, this one criterion will have an ever increasing role in which applications are successfully deployed and sticky – particularly in the cloud.”

Customers like HealthMEDX and Wayfair know the value of BMC’s “chart and compass” well.

Finding the needle in the haystack – “We wanted to stop the finger pointing,” explained Chris Bingham, vice president of infrastructure at HealthMEDX, a US-based software vendor for long-term care, home care and therapy organizations. According to Bingham, HealthMEDX has between 7,000 and 12,000 concurrent users per second accessing its applications.

According to Bingham, diagnosing end user experience issues was a source of constant frustration as it took too many cycles to figure out the real issues. Within hours of implementing the BMC End User Experience Management solution, however, he had access to data points such as end-to-end latency and network latency that helped to draw the line from the individual user experience to the issue. HeathMEDX can now trace performance issues all the way from the user to the code, and they can do it quickly.

“The BMC solution has really increased the pace at which we identify problems,” said Steve Conine, CTO and co-founder, Wayfair, the largest online retailer of home furnishings. “We don’t want customer service calling us up, walking over and telling us something is down. We want to know it is down before they call us.”

Building competitive advantage – Having the best user experience is a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and BMC is helping customers to differentiate themselves in this space.

For Bingham and HealthMEDX, what started as an effort to more quickly address end- user problems has blossomed into a proactive approach to incorporating the end user experience into every aspect of the HealthMEDX Vision solution lifecycle. They now use end-user data to influence new releases of their software.

“This proactive approach has made our credibility with our customers go through the roof,” said Bingham.

“Today, the BMC End User Experience Management solution is on the main screens in our IT rooms and it’s one of the things that everyone looks at. If we have completed a recent code push, we know to keep our eyes on that screen for potential issues,” said Conine. Wayfair hosts more than 2.5 million visitors per week and has completed nearly 10 million orders since 2002.

Defining user experience in the cloud – The agility and cost effective benefits of delivering applications, particularly customer-facing web applications, via the cloud have increased exponentially. Yet a high quality experience for the end user remains the life-blood of cloud applications, and is essential to success. Currently most related solutions look first at the complex application back-end rather than starting with the end user, increasing the time to find and resolve end-user problems.

“The idea that we could have a holistic view into our end user experience previously seemed mythical to me,” said Bingham. “As we are moving our business into a hybrid cloud model, I believe my imagination is the only limitation as to how we can utilize the data from the BMC solution to improve our business. It is one of the best IT decisions I have ever made.”

“Delivering mission critical services across cloud based offerings brings unique management challenges,” said Kia Behnia, BMC’s chief technology officer. “Providing visibility into how cloud services are being experienced by end users provides the map to delivering reliable and differentiated services for customers.”

For more information about BMC and the BMC End User Experience Management solution, please visit:

• BMC End User Experience Management
• Wayfair video
• Follow BMC on Twitter

Business Runs on IT. IT Runs on BMC Software.

Business runs better when IT runs at its best. That's why more than 20,000 IT organizations – from the Global 100 to the smallest businesses – in over 120 countries rely on BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to manage their business services and applications across distributed, mainframe, virtual and cloud environments. With the leading Business Service Management platform, Cloud Management, and the industry’s broadest choice of IT management solutions, BMC helps customers cut costs, reduce risk and achieve business objectives. For the four fiscal quarters ended March 31, 2012, BMC revenue was approximately $2.2 billion.