In 2013, venerable IT management vendor BMC Software went private, a move that CEO Bob Beauchamp says enabled the company to invest heavily in modernizing technology, fresh leadership and a new strategy aimed at helping customers advance their digital transformation initiatives. In this installment of the IDG CEO Interview Series, Beauchamp talked with Chief Content Officer John Gallant about how BMC’s Digital Enterprise Management plan can deliver ‘massive cost savings,’ make it easier for companies to get to the cloud and manage services that span the data center and cloud. He discussed the cloud-focused transformation of the BMC product line and how the company is helping customers capture opportunities around the Internet of Things as well.
Bob, we last spoke when BMC went private in September, 2013. Will you remind us why you did that? Also, what did that allow you to do that you couldn’t do as a publicly held company?
Those are two very different questions. Let me take the second question first. Since going private, the company has been able to invest an enormous amount of money in innovation and developing new technologies, new go-to-market capabilities and bringing on some world-class executives. In order to do that, we decreased our profit goals because our investors felt that with this new digital wave coming, those companies that have the right products, technology, go-to-market offerings and executives would be in a great position. They let me invest a lot of money in those areas.
As a public company you could do it, but the company back then was already under quite a bit of pressure from the public market that wanted profits to just go up forever. The private investors let me go the other way. They let me lower the profits, to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on new technology and new people.
I’m going to ask a number of questions about your new Digital Enterprise Management strategy but before we get into that, I want to dig in a bit more about what’s changed in the past two-plus years at BMC.