On November 16, Accenture and BMC announced the expansion of their already existing relationships with joint development and delivery agreements plus additional technology services for the ongoing BSM journey. Beyond gaining additional delivery consultants to BMC’s Professional Service organization, this will also allow both companies to focus on developing solutions which allow IT organizations to optimize and streamline their operation while taking advantage of technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing.

So what is behind the BMC/Accenture partnership?

While BMC already has its own Professional Service Organization (BMC PSO), this partnership gives them additional scalability in the delivery of Business Service Management solutions to their joined customer base. Accenture’s reputation with C-level executives is high, and the company itself has done many ITSM and BSM consulting projects in the past. Therefore the combination is a great fit.  Additionally, BMC is facing continuous pressure from vendors such as IBM and HP who have large consulting groups. This is the building of a new powerhouse able to compete fair and square against IBM and HP, and it signals BMC's intention to fight them on all fronts. The concept of BSM and the implementation of BSM projects are becoming more important as IT organizations are realizing that they are unable to cope with the growth of complexity and the demands from the business for better, faster, and more cost effective solutions. Forrester predicts that BSM and associated markets will grow to $3.9 billion in 2013. Business leaders are looking for IT to drive and add value across the enterprise. However, the existing reputation of IT within the business is fairly low, and it will take IT to work across its own silos and work with the executives in the business units to deliver on this BSM aspiration. Accenture is strong in understanding business executives, and this can bring great value to a company like BMC who delivers solutions to cross this bridge between the business and IT.