The revisions should help integrate system management functions and assist customers in setting up programs based around quality standards such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), said Fred Johannessen, a program executive at BMC. "We think we can really enhance the customer's ability to mature their [ITIL] processes," in areas such as incident and problem management, he said.

Coldwater Creek Inc., a clothing retailer in Sandpoint, Idaho, will be upgrading with five of the software revisions in six months, in hopes of making system changes more efficient as it nearly doubles its workforce over the year-end buying season, said Mike Carper, divisional vice president of technology operations at Coldwater Creek.

The revisions will add human resources functions to provisioning and identification management capabilities, so that when 4,000 additional salespeople and other seasonal workers are added, they can quickly have access to applications in the systems, Carper said. Coldwater Creek has about 6,000 year-round employees.

Current versions of the BMC products have helped Coldwater Creek install new software releases in less than two weeks systemwide; such changes might have taken months without the BMC tools, Carper said. "BMC products have worked very well and have exceeded my expectations," he said, noting that Coldwater Creek has spent in the "mid six figures" in the past year on BMC offerings. A detailed study looking at the return on the investment for BMC tools is under way, but Carper said he knows that purchasing and installing BMC's tools cost half what it would have cost to customize service desk products from Hewlett Packard Co.

Coldwater Creek plans to install the following five revisions in six months: BMC Remedy Change Management 7.0, which starts at US$20,000; BMC Remedy Asset Management 7.0, which starts at about $40,000; BMC Remedy Service Desk 7.0, which starts at $10,000; BMC Configuration Management 7.0, which is priced based on the number of endpoints and components used; and BMC Atrium Centralized Management Database 2.0, which is included in the price of many BMC applications. All are due to ship by Friday or are already shipping.