Excerpts from that interview follow:

Given your company's recent financial success, why do you think IT pros like your products? It started four years ago when we conceived Business Service Management products. We knew that the Information Technology Infrastructure Library [ITIL] and IT process optimization was going to become a central focus of IT. So we built an entire product portfolio and a whole strategy around software to manage IT processes and ITIL optimization. We saw in the last quarter that Chevron has a strong initiative around ITIL implementations trying to consolidate their service desks around the world. It resulted in a seven-figure transaction for us. We won [that work] over HP and CA. In the last year, CIOs now talk more about IT process improvement than about infrastructure. We saw a 30 percent growth in our BSM product line this quarter.

So, why are you better than HP, CA or IBM? The honest answer is that we have, by far, the best products and, by far, the largest share of sales of IT service management software. We're winning the bake-offs against competitors on software technology and expertise. We were out the gate first in April 2003 when we announced BSM, and nobody else was even talking about it.

Is the revenue pie for these products suddenly bigger, or are you getting a larger piece of the pie? It's both. We're seeing IT organizations say, "Let's go update service management environments with new Web-based technologies and let's use ITIL." Nobody was even talking about ITIL outside of Europe four years ago.

But could your increased revenues also be a result of the fact that IT shops have loosened the purse strings after the long recession? Oh, the recession, I don't even want to think about those days. Now we're seeing people turning their focus back on IT. BMC was listed in a recent survey among those vendors who would gain from IT spending, with Microsoft and others.