IT management specialist BMC Software has today announced the acquisition of network compliance and change management firm Emprisa Networks, and has launched BMC Service Automation, a new strategy designed to let IT departments quickly adapt an entire IT infrastructure to the changing demands of a business.

The Emprisa deal is designed to let BMC’s business service management (BSM) technologies better address the needs of complex, multi-vendor network infrastructures.

“With the acquisition of Emprisa Networks, BMC extends its service automation strategy to help customers reach IT automation and efficiency goals across the entire infrastructure- inside the data centre and out,” said Jim Grant, BMC senior vice president. “Managing change across the network is critical for service availability and provisioning.”

The new set of Service Automation solutions, meanwhile, will automate delivery of end-to-end business services, ranging from provisioning and configuration to maintenance and compliance, and can expand across end-user terminals, networks, servers and virtualised environments.

The all-in-one management solution moves away from the common approach of firms managing IT devices individually, said BMC.

Peter Armstrong, BMC corporate strategist, said the old method, which he calls the “managing widgets approach,” causes problems and inefficiency because “the pieces don’t talk to each other”.

IT departments need to streamline their processes and become more efficient because of the increasing pressures placed on IT administrators coupled with the decrease in their financial resources, Armstrong said. While some areas, such as spending on servers, have become cheaper, the cost of administering them is “going through the roof”, he added.

With an ability to integrate multi-vendor technologies, the new BMC solution does not have any hardware, server or platform limitations, according to the vendor. This allows customers to maintain many of their existing systems and processes, while also giving more flexibility and thereby enabling a quick adaptation to change, Armstrong said.

Responding to change is now as easy as pressing a button for IT departments, Armstrong argued. BMC recently acquired RealOps, a provider of run book automation systems, and this lets the new solution accelerate the execution of critical operational service functions, he added.

Companies can also benefit from an audit trail, showing who made a change and when exactly it was made, Armstrong said. This would allow an enterprise to comply with increasing regulatory pressures, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, he added.