Further benefits that follow on from operating SiteAngel as a service. It means it can benefit from the economies of scale of a shared infrastructure, which opens up possibilities for adding more sophisticated features. BMC's SiteAngel infrastructure is spread across more than a dozen points of presence worldwide.

Rather than operating in isolation from each other, BMC has engineered the SiteAngel network so that the nodes communicate constantly with each other. This enables them to avoid sending out "false positive" alerts, which frequently occur when, for instance a problem on an Internet backbone link means that packets are temporarily lost or delayed.

Since the Internet recovers from such failures, they should not generate an alert warning that the site has gone down. But if a monitoring service is only watching from a single point, it has no way of knowing whether it is the site or the Internet that is at fault.

Market Entrants Grow in Size

BMC's Mary Nugent has noticed a change in the market for BMC's service offerings in the past year. Established telecoms companies and large IT service providers have shown increasing interest, while the numbers of pureplay ASPs — as well as their demand projections — have declined. "In the past quarter I have dealt more with the telcos than with pureplay ASPs. The telcos know and understand about utility—based services," she said. Big—name IT services providers such as Accenture, CSC, EDS and Perot have all had discussions as potential or confirmed partners. "These guys know how to do website hosting and complex application hosting," she said. Telcos, on the other hand, have gaps in their knowledge base that they are likely to fill by acquisition, she added. "They know ping, power and pipe, but they don't have the applications expertise. These telcos have plenty of money and they're going to acquire what they need."

Thanks to BMC's network of points of presence, SiteAngel sites communicate with each other to triage a problem from several separate vantage points, and thus make sure that only "true positive" alerts are generated.

"This is the first service out there that will try and triage whether this is really an error and not something caused by Internet latency," said Nugent.

The multi-node network of course is also fault tolerant, since if one hub goes down, the other nodes will become aware of that and make adjustments to compensate.

SiteAngel therefore becomes one of the first examples of an Internet-based application service that is truly location-independent — Internet—resident to the degree that the user does not even know where the application is operating from at any particular moment.

Partner Friendly
The final plank in BMC's SiteAngel strategy has been to engineer the service so that it can be hosted and delivered by partners.

Although BMC itself manages and operates the application, it is hosting the Internet—wide network of SiteAngel nodes with providers such as NTT, KPN, Telenor, Digital Island and others, who themselves become SiteAngel resellers.

This arrangement then cascades down to smaller BMC partners, who will have the opportunity to resell the SiteAngel service as partners of the larger hosting companies.

"BMC's mission is to be the provider that gives [partners] the best tools to be ready to give services," said Nugent.

To that end, BMC has put in a lot of work so that the application can be integrated with a service provider's client portal, operational support systems, and infrastructure. "We're really having to write a middleware layer that will be suitable for a service provider," she added.

The application also integrates with BMC's flagship Patrol application management product, so that if SiteAngel issues an alarm, the customer can look at the information in the same console with Patrol and compare what happened. Although many customers buy and operate Patrol themselves, it will also be offered as service alongside SiteAngel.

"I believe the future of my business will be that it will have to be delivered over the Internet as a service," said Nugent. But that doesn't mean BMC plans to become a service provider in its own right. "We are a software manufacturer — that is our role. Right now, the service provider is my customer," she said. "It's kinda cool [that] I host SiteAngel with my partners."