Directors and staff
The company was founded by John Jay Moores in 1980; Moores was a "former Shell Oil computer specialist ... whose software made Shell's computers more efficient."

Richard A. Hosley II was president and chief executive officer of BMC Software, Inc. from October 1987 until April 1990. Prior to being president, Hosley was BMC’s first salesman. Later, as vice-president of sales and marketing, he was responsible for designing and implementing the highly innovative and cost effective telemarketing process and the commission scheme for salesmen and product authors for which BMC was known. Shortly after becoming president, Hosley took the company public in 1988. In Hosley’s ten years with BMC, sales grew from under one million to more than $100 million and employees from two (Hosley and Moores) to over 500 people. Hosley was succeeded by Max Watson, Jr. in April 1990.

Max Watson Jr. was chairman and chief executive officer of BMC Software from April 1990 to January 2001. At one point, he was listed as one of Houston's highest paid executives; in 2000, his salary and bonus was $1.2 million. In 2001, BMC had a policy of only awarding stock options once every three years. But one report described Watson as earning nearly "$37 million for running the Houston company during its period of turmoil." In 2001, BMC appointed the company director, Garland Cupp, to the post of chairman, succeeding Max Watson, who quit the post in January 2001. "Mr. Cupp has been a director since 1989 and was chief information officer at American Express Co.'s travel-related services unit." according to BMC.

Watson was succeeded by BMC's former senior vice president of product management and development, Robert Beauchamp (pron. "Bee-chum"). During his tenure as BMC's chairman and CEO, Beauchamp oversaw business changes including the move of BMC's stock to the New York Stock Exchange, the reorganization of BMC into two primary business units, and the introduction of Business Service Management. In October 2009, BMC returned to NASDAQ‘s electronic trading platform, remaining under the ticker symbol, BMC.

Today, Beauchamp continues to be chairman and CEO of BMC as well as president of its ESM business unit. His total compensation for 2009 is $10,902,868. Beauchamp has been at BMC since 1988; in August 2009, he was 49 years old.

In 2009, other executives include the president of the Mainframe Service Management unit—Bill Miller; and the chief financial officer—Stephen Solcher.
BMC had 6,100 employees in March 2010. BMC is a member of the S&P 500 and was listed as being a member of Fortune's "400 Best Big Companies" in 2009.

Partnerships
As the computer industry moves in the direction of cloud computing, BMC is working with firms like Cisco and VMware to build a so-called Unified Computing System described as a "private cloud in a box"; the Economist Magazine elaborated: "instead of having to wire up servers, storage devices and networking gear, companies can build and reconfigure virtual computer systems with a few mouse clicks," reported the Economist in March 2009. Business analyst Richard Sherman said the alliance "raises BMC’s profile in the server automation industry" and would raise future revenues. According to the article, BMC's earlier acquisition of BladeLogic in 2008 was key to the formation of the alliance with Cisco. In June 2009, BMC received a "CIO 100 award" for "innovative use of an internal cloud computing environment to achieve maximum return on server and storage investments."

In July 2009, BMC and Amazon Web Services announced IT organizations will be able to extend their internal data centers to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon ec2) through BMC’s BSM platform.

In November 2009, BMC announced Service Desk Express (BMC Remedyforce) will be sold, marketed and available via Salesforce.com. "By delivering service desk technology via the cloud, you can abstract all the complexity of the infrastructure that rely on IT services delivery and follow best practices," said BMC chairman and CEO, Bob Beauchamp.

BMC also counts Dell, VMware and NetApp among its strategic alliance partners.

Assets
While BMC's most significant asset is perhaps a workforce of skilled software engineers, the firm owns considerable intellectual property in the form of software code. It elaborated how it protects this property in an SEC filing (2002): "We distribute our products in object code form and rely upon contract, trade secret, copyright and patent laws to protect our intellectual property. The license agreements under which customers use our products restrict the customer's use to its own operations and prohibit disclosure to third persons. We now distribute certain of our products on a shrink-wrap basis, and the enforceability of such restrictions in a shrink-wrap license is unproven in certain jurisdictions. Also, notwithstanding those restrictions, it is possible for other persons to obtain copies of our products in object code form. We believe that obtaining such copies would have limited value without access to the product's source code, which we keep highly confidential. In addition, we employ protective measures such as CPU dependent passwords, expiring passwords and time-based trials."

While software can be considered as intellectual property like screenplays and protected by copyrighting, some software processes can be considered as "inventions" and protected by patent. BMC owns software patents. For example, BMC owns a patent for "GUI interpretation technology for client/server environment" developed by software engineers David T. Sulcer, Lawrence M. Ackner, and Donna S. Lowe-Cleveland which involves complex signals processing; patent attorneys trying to describe this process wrote: "receiving a message from a remote device, the message comprising either a definition, a state change, a command or some combination thereof; processing the definition (if any) before the state change (if any); and processing the state change (if any) before processing the command (if any)."

BMC owns real estate property but it's mostly in four office buildings totaling 1,515,000 square feet (140,700 m2) in Houston, Texas; sales and development offices around the world are leased.

Market Competitors
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