Yesterday, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and BMC SDE Director Greg Myers shared the Dreamforce stage with Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff. Bob and Mark announced a strategic partnership to deliver BMC Service Desk Express solutions on the Force.com platform.

"The alliance between salesforce.com and BMC will accelerate IT management success with cloud computing," said Benioff. "Customers can now leverage enterprise-class IT management completely in the cloud with Force.com and BMC Software." This exciting new SaaS service desk offering is designed for customers looking for strong IT-business integration and rapid time-to-value. In fact, Greg Myers demonstrated a prototype version at Dreamworld that he said was developed on the Force.com platform in less than two months. He pointed out that this new offering would be available in the second quarter of 2010.

Although Salesforce.com is widely accepted as a standard for sales force automation, no dominant Software as a Service (SaaS) solution has emerged for service management. Service-now.com is the best known SaaS service desk competitor but they have only an estimated 250 customers and approximately 80 employees. Service-now.com offers customers an ITSM application that is licensed for use as a service provided to customers on a subscription basis, usually paid annually. Unlike BMC’s SDE or Remedy ITSM, Service-now.com does not require on-site servers, software maintenance contracts, or ongoing software patches. Several years ago, BMC created a SaaS group with the intention of rolling out on-demand versions of SDE and Remedy. Lower demand than expected caused BMC to quietly dissolve the SaaS group. However, BMC just recently began offering a hosted version of Remedy on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Organizations will benefit from this partnership with the availability of SDE on both a SaaS (subscription based) and perpetual basis. They will be able to choose if they want the ease of a cloud enabled service desk, or whether they want to perpetually own the software and run and support it in their own environment. Whatever the choice, as BMC’s #1 Service Desk Express partner RightStar will be there to help meet their service management needs.