BMC Enhances App Store With Partnerpedia Purchase

BMC Software continues to transform itself following its privatisation in May 2012, and the company has now added another key component to its offerings.

It acquired app distributor Partnerpedia on 6 August, but terms of the deal were not revealed.

App Store

Houston, Texas-based BMC already has rebranded Partnerpedia’s application store and named it BMC AppZone. The refaced cloud-based enterprise app store gives enterprise employees access to a list of cloud, mobile, custom and desktop applications – all of which can be used on any device from any location.

BMC AppZone offers line-of-business people at work a similar experience to what they get at home from consumer marketplaces such as Apple iTunes, Amazon App Store and Google Play, BMC Chief Information Officer Mark Settle told eWEEK.

Like BMC’s first consumer app, MyIT, BMC AppZone is designed to reduce IT friction for both workers and IT organisations, Settle said.

BMC is most well-known for software that runs IT service management, data centre automation, performance management, virtualisation life cycle management and cloud computing management. The company is melding the self-service MyIT portal into the AppZone, Settle said.

MyIT takes the help desk to a new level of usefulness and user-friendliness within an enterprise, BMC said. The social media-like software gives employees the power to get the IT services and other information they need at any time of day and from any device, whether or not a service desk is open.

“For example, if your company has a premium arrangement with (online storage and collaboration provider) Box or Evernote, you can get it at AppZone,” Settle said. “This is basically a one-stop shopping centre – not only for cloud-based services like Salesforce.com or whatever, but access to mobile peer-to-peer capabilities as well.

“Just think of it as a bigger, better app store than we had offered in the past, with more management features.”

Canadian Deal

Partnerpedia, based in Vancouver, BC, has been providing private label marketplace and enterprise app stores since it was founded in 1996, so it was well ahead of the cloud computing curve.

The company’s flagship product, Enterprise AppZone, now BMC AppZone, is a mobile application management tool that allows IT managers to purchase, publish and deploy apps for their employees with mobile devices. AppZone allows IT managers to set application- and user-specific policies so that corporate apps and data are secured even when they leave the walls of the organisation.

“We spent the last four years executing our plan to deliver the market’s leading app store solutions for IT,” Partnerpedia CTO and founder Geoff Mair said.

“It’s been our mission to deliver app stores that make accessing applications and services in the enterprise as easy and simple as it has become in the consumer world. AppZone and Marketplace are the results of that effort.”

BMC is offering a free trial of BMC AppZone here.

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Originally published on eWeek.