The Lost Patrol Arrives Home

The Age

Tuesday November 8, 2005

STAN BEER

WITH annual revenues of about $US1.5 billion, BMC is one of the world's top 10 software companies. Much of its success in performance monitoring tools over the past 10 years came from a product called Patrol, developed in Australia and bought by BMC in 1993.

Last week the company's chief technical officer, Tom Bishop (right), was in Australia expounding on the future of enterprise IT, which he says goes beyond performance monitoring.

"When we acquired Patrol the market was focused on monitoring," says Mr Bishop. "Now a trend that has been recognised is that businesses have to justify their IT expenditure from the perspective of benefits. One of the ways a company is measured these days is what does its IT do for the business. It's a more mature strategy called business services management, which involves the integration of IT across the whole management stack."

Mr Bishop is looking for companies wanting to buy BMC technology. We find it ironic that BMC's global research and development centres outside the US are in France, Singapore, Israel and India. As for Australia - well, we're a good place to sell products to.

Diversity at work

As for being an Australian-made product, we were contacted recently by Patrol's founder, Martin Picard. He pointed out that we couldn't describe Patrol as an Australian product per se because, in his words, "While it is true that Patrol was founded in Sydney and was helped by the excellent conditions for startups in Australia, I would hesitate to refer to it as a true product of the Australian educational or business environments."

Educated in Rome and then in the US, Mr Picard started Patrol during his first year in Australia and promptly hired an all-star team of migrants.

"My head developer was Russian, the top marketing person was English, the CFO was Greek-American, the key pre-sales person was German, and many of the developers were Asian. We did have one Aussie - one of the sharpest programmers I have ever worked with - but that hardly comprises much of an Australian brain drain. The Aussie, for one, was relocated when the company sold, got his money and moved right back to Queensland."

As we pointed out in our reply to Mr Picard, we felt that he was missing the point. Australia is a country of migrants so it's immaterial where the developers of Patrol originated because the product was developed in Australia using Australia's excellent infrastructure and resources for startups that Mr Picard described so aptly.

The point is that an excellent product, developed in Australia, was bought at an early stage by a US entrepreneur who then turned it into a global enterprise. We don't accept that similar things could not have been achieved from Australia if there was the expertise and money here - which currently there is not.

Certainly 90 per cent of the sales and marketing would have to be done from the US, but who cares if the development and intellectual property stay here, fostering opportunities for our brightest minds (regardless of where they originate from). If Australia wants to reduce its $19 billion IT deficit, we need to learn how to build at least one or two IT companies of the size and scale of BMC.

New zeal, but get real

At least some of us in the IT media and wider industry have noticed that the Australian Computer Society has become vocal about issues affecting the industry, a bid to raise its profile. The latest example of its new-found zeal was a media release issued last week in which, among other things, the ACS called on the Federal Government to alter its purchasing policies so small local IT players can compete against large multinationals on tenders. We could not agree more with that, but wonder what prompted this sudden desire from the ACS to stand up and be counted. Could it be the appearance on the scene of a new grassroots IT professionals association in CompTIA IT Pro? Maybe it's an effort to stem the leakage of its membership, currently 14,000 and falling.

Any effort to make the ACS more relevant to the wider body of IT professionals is to be welcomed, but we believe that if the ACS is serious about being a representative association, it must become much more inclusive. The organisation has always had a reputation for being academic-oriented, elitist and in many ways divorced from the realities of the wider IT industry. If anyone within the ACS disagrees with that assessment, please explain why your organisation's already meagre membership continues to fall.

Stan Beer publishes ITWire, an opinionated IT news site, at itwire.com.au.chatroom@beernewmedia.com.au

© 2005 The Age

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