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This is the year of accountability for cloud computing. Businesses are demanding that CIOs deliver value and measurable benefits from their cloud projects.

"Clouds have the ability to enable IT organizations to deliver high-performing business services faster and at lower cost, so the business remains competitive and consequently meets their revenue and profit goals," said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "There are few cloud management solutions successfully creating such a reality for customers."

But clouds have certainly come a long way from the science projects of a few years ago. Leveraging these successful prototypes into real business enablers is now the priority for IT organizations around the world. When successfully deployed, clouds are becoming an integral part of managing the business and are the foundation of business IT.

But many organizations continue to struggle to get it right. "Many companies seek to harvest the business benefits of cloud computing rather than 'muddling about' in a perpetual state of experimentation," said Kia Behnia, BMC Software's chief technology officer. "Indra and HCL Technologies are a two examples of [our] customers that have found the path to cloud success."

Indra, an IT solutions and services provider in Europe and Latin America, has employed the BMC cloud management solutions to not only reduce its time to market for new services from months to days, but also optimized its hardware and software resources and improved the management of those resources by 90%.

Further, Indra has realized back-end savings of nearly 40% in areas such as compliance and legal enforcement of security policies. Indra, which has over 40,000 employees located in over 118 locations, constructed an environment called FlexIT from which it supports the delivery of outsourcing operations to its customers.

"When designing FlexIT, we knew we had to meet client expectations for cloud services," said Myriam Blázquez, director of Indra's cloud strategy. "We wanted to provide an integrated solution to our customers for delocalized services in a cloud infrastructure with all of the guarantees of security."

"The advent of cloud has fundamentally changed the way we monitor and manage technology environments and can often muddy the waters when trying to diagnose problems, particularly across hybrid environments," said HCL Technologies ISD's Kaylan Kumar. "BMC's Cloud Operations Management solution allows us to quickly isolate and solve problems."

"A majority of the companies that require infrastructure services are working in a hybrid environment that includes cloud services, yet want unified monitoring of that environment," added Kumar, Kumar, the company's worldwide head of cross functional services. "HCL uses analytics and workflows generated by BMC solutions to better control the complex neighborhoods that most clouds are required to live in."

BMC's cloud management solutions are used to monitor the behavior of pooled virtual and cloud resources as well as provide in-depth visibility into how those resources are performing and impacting cloud services.