 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined with Brian Gracely, here at 60 South Street, downtown Boston, at BMC Day. Happy to have on the program for the first time. Madi Pitkinen, who's the Senior Director of Worldwide Performance and Availability Solution. Analyzing. Analyzing. Availability is also very important, so it's okay. But analytics- Sorry about that, Madi. So, you know, lots of acronyms out there. Tell us a little bit about your background and your role at BMC. Ah, okay. So, I've been with BMC. I like to say that I was raised by BMC. In January, I will have been with BMC for 20 years. And they're a wonderful company, or I wouldn't have stayed there that long. And actually, my background is quite diverse. I started out as a techie, an Oracle DBA. If, you know, there's still a thing, I'm pretty sure. But back in 7016 world, we were migrating from six to seven, so long, long time ago. And I started off in development. And from there, I kind of took my hand at almost everything within BMC. In the past couple of years, I decided I wanted to get out in front of customers. I wanted to interact more. I wanted to help take our message and what we were doing to the market. And I joined our solutions marketing team, and I currently lead that effort around our performance and analytics business. That was a mouthful. So, we've heard a lot today about really, you know, talking about digital transformations, and the transformation that's gone on with BMC. So, since the company went private, you know, how should we be thinking about BMC? What's the positioning that, you know, when do we think about BMC? Okay, so that's the thing. One thing I can do probably better than most people here is talk about the transformation that BMC has gone through. So, BMC has definitely had some major ups and major downs over the 20 years. And most recently, so people have asked me that. That's a common question. I can think of some really high points early in, you know, 2004, 2005, and 90s. And then we've had some rough points, but the acquisition was by far one of the best things that could have happened to BMC. I'm going to tell you a story. I'm a storyteller, so I hope that's okay. That's great. I'm not formal, which is probably why I'm better in marketing than maybe I was in the engineering role. I was at an airport in London. Excuse me, I was catching a flight to Stockholm. And I was just chit chatting. I was just making friends, right? So, you're talking to the guy in front of me, and he says, oh, you're with BMC. It was about a year and a half ago. You're with BMC. I want to say he was with Cisco or he was with, he was one of the big companies. And I said, yeah, it's a great company. He looked at me and he went, you know, it's kind of scary. Aren't they just taking the company and pulling it apart and selling it for pieces? And I looked at him and I went, no. And I said, but if I'm going to be honest, I think that crossed everybody's mind. What really they've done by going private is they invested. And all of a sudden, areas where we wanted to develop and get creative and do some things outside the box. I mean, you think about it, it's a risk. And when you have all these shareholders to worry about, it's a lot harder to take that risk, especially because everything requires funding. And I said, what they've done is they've taken tons of money and they've poured it into my group and in other groups at BMC. And all of a sudden we're developing and we're innovating and it's actually a very, very exciting time. So what I can say is those words are probably even more true now. And what we're starting to see are some of the fruits of that labor. We're starting to come to market. We made a re-snack position with TrueSight Pulse and we took that to market in September timeframe and that's venturing us into the DevOps space and it's exciting what we're about to do. In fact, we just announced support for Docker. So we're getting into the containerization world and we're helping our IT constituents and our customers be able to support technology like that. And then of course, TrueSight Intelligence. And that's coming out at the start of the calendar year. We'll really make a big push probably around the end of the first quarter, second quarter. And what that's doing is that's taking IT and what's become so critical to IT and allowing them to have that connection to the business and become in an essence more intelligent about how they run their internal operations. So you talked about storytelling. Everything today was just kind of, we're at the beginning of this next big transformation. People, and for a lot of companies, internally they have to tell stories. I mean, how am I going to get from here to who I'm competing against? How am I going to, as a marketer, especially around your private company now, which is different than being a public company, what changes from how you try and explain what BMC does and then maybe help your customers tell their internal stories. Does it change a lot as a private company versus a public company? Do you have more freedoms to talk about things? Well, I mean, I think we still have to follow the same rules as everybody else. So there's certain limitations still on what we can share and what we can't share. As far as storytelling, what I would say is the journey is a different one. So it is very different in the sense of, I think in the past we were very bound with, these are our solutions. We knew what brought in money, right? And you look at traditional IT and where it stood. And we've been supporting traditional IT for, was it 30 something years? I don't know the exact amount of time. But now we're getting into spaces that maybe we weren't in before. And I think what we're able to do is actually talk to innovations, talk to new areas, new disciplines. DevOps is one I brought up, containerization is another. And what I'm allowed to do now, I probably would have been allowed to, technically allowed to do it before, but maybe I wouldn't have because the belief, the truth wasn't there. But I can talk about these things even if we don't necessarily support them yet. So it's this ability to, not just craft a vision, everybody has to craft a vision, but it's a real vision. And it's this notion of, hey, you know, and I know about Docker, but it's in my mind right now, but Docker, I mean, in the past, we might've talked about internally Docker and we knew it was there, but we didn't necessarily have support. So it became something you become fearful of. But now we have this freedom. I don't know it's the culture, it's the vibe, but maybe we didn't have it yet, but we knew we were going to work towards it. We knew it was important and I could talk about it. I wasn't saying anything wrong. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'm curious, you bring up Docker and we've really hard topic. We've been at DockerCon. How much of that is your customers coming to you and saying, where are they? Where are your customers? How much of it is a push versus a pull? How does it come up in the conversation? So customers are definitely talking to us about it, right? But I think one thing that's different, so customers will always help us and guide us with our solutions. But we also recognize that IT in itself is changing. And so maybe the things that our traditional customers were doing, they want to venture out and they're not used to coming to BMC for it. So if we look at Docker, I think our customers are venturing there, but not necessarily have come to us and said, hey, BMC, we need support. What we're able to do now is recognize the trends that are in the market and start to take action. And so what we've discovered, I mean, Docker obviously, it's a natural thing to do. It's important, it's critical. I think we're going to see a lot more of it, right? But what we're able to do is go out and provide that support and we're having conversations with customers who are like, wow, we were just talking about having to run support and I had no idea what I was going to do. And they were looking, but they weren't thinking necessarily BMC and now they are starting to. They're starting to get that, hey, we're not one of the, what did somebody describe us as? One of the big stodgy, you know, we're actually not. We're kind of, we're pretty cool now. Yeah, so one of the themes that's been discussed a lot is how fast things are changing. When I think about solutions marketing, building that pipeline of solutions, there's a process that's involved and usually you come up with the idea, you create it, you push it out, you go to market, you get traction. How does that rate of change affect what's happening in solutions marketing? Well, I mean, even marketing, if you look at it, it's got to be agile, right? And you know, one of the things that's interesting is if you look at software companies and IT companies, there's a big push to selling towards marketing. And I think it's because marketing has become very analytical. You don't just go and create a flyer and mail it out anymore, right? Nobody gets that kind of stuff anymore. It's all digital, it's all on your laptop. I mean, look what we're doing here today, right? This is very, very different than what we would have done in the past. So we have to change, marketing has to change as rapidly as well. You can't take eight weeks to build a white paper. You need to understand what the customer is thinking and you almost need to, in some ways, not just as a second guess, but predict the trends and start to act on them and start to figure it out. So what we do, we tie very closely with product management. So in the marketing realm, we're working with them and their vision, but in many ways, we're also seeing firsthand the vision of our customers and we're having to tie the two and then we're quickly having to change the way that we're taking the message forward. Does that make sense? So you're talking about Docker, you're talking about some of these cool open source types of the Unicorn stuff. If I go to an O'Reilly event or something, it's all open source. It's open source tools, it's open source. But we talked, the keynote today was how do I link the new systems of engagement, which is the new cool stuff with systems of record and how much do you guys have to get more into being around those communities and make people understand that, yes, you might be doing stuff with Docker or something new and cool, but you've got to link back to those other systems that have that data and BMC may start having those interconnection points more and more. How do you get into those communities? It's not easy, let me tell you, because we're not traditionally thought that way, but it is important to maintain our link back to where we were. So if you look at industrial IT, and it sounds like a nasty term and I don't think it is, I think it's actually important, because even the cool, hot DevOps IT centers need to deliver a certain level of performance and availability that assurance has to be there. And that really came from industrialized IT, this ability, quick time to resolution, et cetera. So we live there, we're helping them make sure they can support the technology, but we are venturing out open source, we brought that up. We need people to understand that we're not the BMC back then. You guys, are you familiar with BSM? Okay, so BMC, when we launched the BSM business service management message and we took that to market, it was in many ways ahead of its time with this integration of all the components and the shared messaging. But one of the things that I think at the time we were trying to do was convince everyone that, hey, if you get BMC across the board, then you integrate everything and it's nirvana. Right. One big thing that has shifted within BMC, and I can speak to performance analytics, I think I can speak across BMC overall. We get it, it's not going to all be BMC. Even if I look in the monitoring space, a typical company has what, 30, 50 different monitoring tools that have just been pulled in and brought in. We have to think broader, we have to take BSM. It's a great idea. We want everything integrated, but it can't be all BMC and so we've opened our arms and we take integrations and we work with solutions, even some that our competitors are taking to market, and we have to. And I think that you'll continue to see that change. And then open source, we've always used open source technology. So that's nothing new, but what I think you're going to start to see from BMC is us really giving back. And we're starting to work on, you know what, if you look at our intelligence solution, we have a lot of open source technology in that that's coming to market. What can we take and we're working on? What do we take and give back to the open source community? And that's something we've never done before. So it will take time. Yeah, but a lot of big changes coming. Well, yeah, but I think it's necessary. Excellent. All right. Well, Marty, I think that's a great place to end the conversation here. Thanks for sharing with us everything on performance and availability. Analytics. Analytics. Well, you could say that it's okay. You know what? You know, in the keynote, it said that Bill Bills was performance and availability. Oh, analytics. You're fine. Thanks so much. I actually think it's just important, so it's okay. Yeah, performance and analytics. Absolutely hugely important in what's going on. We'll be back with more coverage from BMC Day. Thanks for watching.