SAN JOSE, Calif. and HOUSTON, March 16, 2009 - Cisco and BMC Software [NYSE: BMC] today announced their collaboration to deliver a major management breakthrough for the new Cisco Unified Computing System.

Combined with BMC's Business Service Management, Cisco's Unified Computing System represents a quantum leap forward in enhancing customers' ability to provision and reconfigure the entire stack of mission-critical business services, along with the supporting applications and the underlying virtual and physical resources. In many data centers, these manual tasks take weeks or even months to accomplish. The combined Cisco and BMC Software solution is designed to automate these actions through a single management console, potentially allowing these tasks to be completed in just minutes.

The Cisco Unified Computing System Manager offers a deep integration with BMC BladeLogic Service Automation and BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This combined solution helps enable customers to define fully configured, customized service profiles with fully provisioned application environments, and then deploy them rapidly to meet their business or computing requirements. BMC Atrium CMDB gives real-time insight to the business impact of the Cisco Unified Computing System while BMC's larger Business Service Management portfolio offers performance management, service management, and IT process automation for the Unified Computing System or the full enterprise IT infrastructure.

Customers can purchase the Unified Computing System pre-packaged with BMC's powerful BladeLogic service automation suite, including BMC Atrium technology, when the Unified Computing System becomes generally available to customers starting in the second calendar quarter of 2009. Cisco and BMC will also collaborate to deliver joint sales engagements, technical support, professional services and technology development.

Prem Jain, senior vice president of Cisco's Server and Access virtualization Business Unit, said: "Proper management of dynamic, virtual IT environments is critical for realizing their full business impact. The Unified Computing System represents a complete paradigm shift in terms of what it costs to acquire, manage and administer IT environments of the future. Working closely with Cisco, BMC Software has delivered the very important pieces of software that make the Unified Computing System revolution real."

"Customers clearly have been waiting a long time for this promised revolution," said Jim Grant, BMC's senior vice president for strategy and corporate development. "For years, we've all heard a lot of talk about concepts like 'adaptive enterprise.' We've seen increasingly monolithic infrastructure models cobbled together from existing piece parts and limited by a business mandate to protect old platform investments. As a result, customers and channel partners often have felt trapped in highly prescriptive IT frameworks that cannot successfully manage and operate the datacenter of the future. Working together, BMC and Cisco have eliminated these limitations presented by the inflexible architectures of the past. The Cisco Unified Computing System changes everything."

Additional Resources:

• Video: Bob Beauchamp Remarks on Unified Computing
• Press release: Cisco Unified Computing System
• Press release: Cisco Open Partner Ecosystem