Jason Andrew

Software giant BMC’s motto is ‘bring IT to life’, and the company lives up to that promise, with a global presence and 82 per cent of Fortune 500 companies using BMC for their industrialised IT solutions. The company specialises in IT service and operations management, cloud computing, workload automation, and mainframes. The company was founded in 1980 by Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer, whose surname initials make up the letters of the company’s name, and has its headquarters in Houston, Texas. In 2013, the company was privatised, with a number of investors coming on board to push growth.

The CEO Magazine spoke to Jason Andrew, General Manager and Vice President of EMEA, about his time at BMC. Born in New Zealand, Jason studied accountancy and law at the Auckland University of Technology before becoming a consultant in the IT sector. He has been with BMC since 1997, originally as a consultant before moving into executive positions in the company. Jason'’s area of expertise is customer experience, and he has had a number of roles in marketing and sales during his time at BMC.

The CEO Magazine: What have been some of the highlights in your time as VP?

Jason: BMC’s offering is structured into five different pillars of product and solution lines. Traditionally, we found our customers would invest in one BMC solution area, such as IT service management, and they would not take up other offerings. Now, a customer’s initial investment in BMC seems to be just the start of their journey with us and we are continually seeing organisations deploying BMC throughout their IT infrastructure.

When I moved into EMEA I saw two distinct growth opportunities. The first was in markets where we felt we could invest in and penetrate more aggressively, and the second was expanding our portfolio with our existing client base.

This strategy was key in growing BMC’s business within a 12-month period in Russia and the Middle East (with oil and energy businesses), as well as increasing our portfolio with our existing key markets: Germany, France and UK/Ireland (with banking and telecommunication service providers). In that 12-month window we also increased our presence in the Nordics (blue-chip organisations).

What do you hope to achieve in the next three to five years?

If someone asked me to describe BMC’s main mission, I would say “flat out growth”. The growth initiative is driven by heavy investments into our products and our existing customer community. In the past 18 months, the investment in R&D into BMC’s product offering has increased dramatically – we now invest about a third of our profits into R&D.

I’'ve taken nearly 29 per cent of my resources that I had when I arrived three years ago and repurposed them into non-chargeable, non-billable customer-facing roles. The focus of these roles is to help clients recognise the value they are receiving from their investment in BMC solutions, but also to assist them in transforming their businesses in the new digital economy.