BMC Software, a provider of enterprise management solutions and a $1.5B company has made quite a splash recently. No that wasn't the dead splash falling in the water, but rather the splash of water in your face if you are CA or HP. Watch Out!

BMC has been Honored for Innovation in Software Development, Partner Activities, Customer Satisfaction and Identity Management...

"BMC's Infrastructure and Application Management development team was selected as winner of a 2006 Innovator Award by Application Development Trends (ADT) for the development of BMC Performance Manager using the Scrum methodology."

To receive this award, they combined their many PATROL applications into a single architecture in a 10 month timeframe. Not a trivial task given the very distinct architectures in each of those separate applications gained through years of development and acquisition. Many companies would hope to complete such a migration in years, if at all.

BMC puts much of their success on their recent (just over 1 year) migration to agile methods - in this case, Scrum. A feat itself - transitioning 1000's of developers over multiple continents (including a majority in India) transitioning from a typical specification-driven waterfall process to an iterative and collaborative agile process.

I know they have some great leadership at BMC - in fact, I have worked with the VP of this division for a different company. But I would be naive to believe that all of these awards and recent success were a direct result of such a recent agile transition of such a large organization. Having assisted multiple large agile transitions and hearing from others, I know the difficult road required to change the organizational structures and culture to foster true agile benefits - especially globally distributed ones.

None the less, I can also imagine that a couple of their divisions (and that is what this article is about) have fostered early agile success and will lead the whole company forward into a new parallel of productivity that could wipe out the market from underneath CA and HP if they are not careful. I continue to be amazed at what inspired leadership combined with empowered, self-organizing teams can accomplish in such a short timeframe.

Would you rather be big or fast? Right now CA and HP are big, but BMC is agile and moving fast. While still the underdog, I'll make my bet with BMC. Where would you put your money?