Accenture and BMC Software have agreed to jointly develop and implement BMC Business Service Management solutions including virtualization, cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service.

Accenture is a US-based management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with about 204,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. BMC Softare is a US-based business service management company. 

Going by the agreement, Accenture and BMC will jointly develop, market and implement packaged and custom Business Service Management (BSM) solutions. BSM is designed to provide businesses with a single, integrated IT automation and management platform, in turn to help customers extract maximum return on their IT investments.

A separate agreement between the two companies provides that Accenture to offer consulting and integration services to BMC's Professional Services organization so as to increase BMC's delivery capacity and implementation capabilities. Accordingly, Accenture professionals are to form a new consulting team for BMC to help implement business service management solutions for BMC and its clients. 

"BMC's business service management offerings aim to help IT organizations deliver services more efficiently, reduce costs and improve application performance," said Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Enterprise Systems management research director.

"IDC is seeing increasing demand for data center automation, capacity planning and analytic tools to help IT organizations streamline operations and cope with the operational complexity caused by virtualization and cloud computing. The extended relationship between Accenture and BMC directly targets these challenges."