BMC Software Inc. will showcase new business-service management products and practices at a conference this week in New York.

The vendor is now 18 months into its business-service management initiative, which it launched in April 2003 to help businesses align IT operations with business objectives. "We believe we are moving from the early adopter phase into the more pragmatic phase of people actually implementing business-service management," says Chuck Stern, VP of worldwide marketing for BMC. "The question for customers now isn't what is [business-service management], or why should we be interested, but how can I do it, and how to move to a practical implementation."

A new "Routes to Value" program identifies eight specific business-service management thrusts, which the company says will enable customers to clearly define implementation phases and create proven return on investments, Stern says. "The routes to value will enable us to address the specific objectives they've got around [business-service management], and provide an achievable implementation methodology."

The eight routes are service-level management, incident and problem management, infrastructure and application management, service impact and event management, asset management and discovery, change and configuration management, capacity management and provisioning, and identity management.

While most customers won't implement all eight routes, at least not initially, they will choose those most specific to their business needs, and underlying investments will be put in place to make work in additional routes easier in the future, Stern says.

BMC's new products include Service Impact Manager 5.0, which will ship in December and is an upgrade to the current 4.5 version. It will include a configuration and management database and integrate with new discovery products to better automate population, validation, and management of the service model of all the IT assets within a company and their relationship to business services, says Mary Nugent, VP and general manager of BMC's Service Management Solutions group.

In conjunction, the company is announcing the availability of Discovery Express, an agentless component to identify what items make up a company's IT environment, and Marimba Configuration Discovery, which provides additional detail on asset configuration.

Also being unveiled is the integration of Mainview, a mainframe-management product, and SmartDBA, a data-management product, into BMC's Service Impact Manager.