Bill Miller, vice president and general manager of BMC's mainframe service management unit, said the Houston-based company is adding capabilities for feeding information on outages, slowdowns and other mainframe system events into its Atrium 2.0 configuration management database. The Atrium software initially supported distributed systems only, Miller said.

Some of the BMC products are available now, including a new tool that sends data about mainframe events to BMC's Service Impact Manager software so users can analyze their impact on business operations. Others are due by year's end, including a tool that automatically identifies mainframe assets and puts information about them into Atrium.

BMC also plans to integrate the configuration database with its Batch Impact Manager software for monitoring and reporting on business services tied to batch processing jobs, Miller said.

Merrill Lynch & Co. plans to evaluate the new tools as a possible means of expanding its internal systems management capabilities, said Tony Lotito, first vice president and manager of mainframe services at the New York-based financial services firm.

Merrill Lynch has been a user of BMC's Mainview tools since 2001. Lotito said he thinks that over the years, BMC has continued to outflank its top rivals in the mainframe management software market, including CA Inc. and IBM's Tivoli Software unit.