Gijima acquires BMC's BSM business

South African based system integrator Gijima has acquired the South African BMC Business Service Management business from African Legend Indigo (AL Indigo). BMC, based in Houston, USA, is a global provider of business service management software.

The highly-qualified BMC team has transitioned to Gijima to strengthen and complement Gijima’s own BMC skill set. There are now 74 BMC skills focusing on BMC solutions within Gijima. With the acquisition, Gijima becomes an elite partner to BMC, providing enterprise service management (ESM) and mainframe service management (MSM) solutions.

“The value of the acquisition to current customers and enterprises in sub-Sahara Africa is Gijima’s ability to bring a comprehensive ESM solution set to market by reselling or offering a managed service,” says Steve Loubser, acting managing executive at Gijima.

Gijima is one of the largest users of BMC within the region and is the only reseller that relies internally on the BMC solution to offer its services. It can now offer expert solution architects, implementation consultants, support and service engineers with comprehensive training and managed services, as well as share its own experiences.

The acquisition also extends Gijima’s software as a service (SaaS) offering into the enterprise systems management space, in addition to already offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (Paas). This means Gijima can now offer prospective clients remote availability monitoring (on/off), performance measurement, pre-emptive and accelerated problem resolution, and capacity planning.

“In order to deliver this service, the BMC Business Service Management business will become part of the newly-established Gijima Integrated Service Centre (iSC) with the objective of pre-emptive incident identification and problem resolution, increased first-call resolution, cost reduction and, ultimately, improved client experience,” says Loubser.

This also represents a strategic component of Gijima’s cloud computing strategy as the BMC solution incorporates service catalogues, provisioning, resource allocation (hardware and services), and the metering of consumption, which will interface with SAP for billing.

What makes Gijima unique is its association with BMC since 1997, not only as a reseller, but also a substantial user of the BMC software suite. Gijima uses Remedy as its core service desk application and interfaces this with client service desk applications. It uses the ESM tools at a number of outsource clients to perform availability, performance and capacity management in line with ITIL 3 best practices.

The acquisition also boosts Gijima’s client base locally and into Africa, with customers from the financial services industry, commercial industry, telecommunications, government, and across Africa from the Ivory Coast to Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Cameroon, Botswana, Namibia, Mauritius, Kenya and Yemen. In terms of current clients, it broadens the scope of service beyond the current delivery.

“Although the team predominantly supports BMC solutions, most have also been cross-skilled in supporting competing products. The team adds substantial IP to disciplines such as service management, capacity management, availability management and overall software support that complements Gijima’s current support of similar products from HP, IBM and CA. Gijima has the ability to exchange information and integrate among these more popular offerings in the ESM space.

“The new combined team is greater than the sum of the two separate entities, providing expertise across the entire scope of enterprise systems management, enterprise service management and mainframe service management, where solutions can be architected, implemented, maintained, or provided as a service,” says Loubser.

Gijima continues to trade under cautionary due to unrelated discussions that may have a material impact on its share price.

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