BMC Software, Inc. is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting, and Enterprise Software company based in Houston, Texas. Gartner has positioned BMC as a Leader for the eighth consecutive years in Gartner's 2021 Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools for its BMC Helix ITSM solution. History The company was founded in Houston, Texas, by former Shell employees Scott Boulette, John Moores, and Dan Cloer, whose surname initials were adopted as the company name BMC Software. Moores served as the company's first CEO. The firm primarily wrote software for IBM mainframe computers, the industry standard at the time, but since the mid-1990s has been developing software to monitor, manage and automate both distributed and mainframe systems. In 1987, Moores was succeeded by Richard A. Hosley II as CEO and President. In July 1988, BMC was re-incorporated in Delaware and went public with an initial public offering for BMC stock. The first day of trading was August 12, 1988. BMC stock was originally traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol BMCS and on the New York Stock Exchange with symbol BMC. Acquisition and privatization by private equity firms In May 2013, BMC announced that it was being acquired by a group of major private equity investment groups for $6.9 billion. The process was completed in September 2013 and the company is no longer publicly traded. It was announced on October 2, 2018 that BMC was acquired by KKR, a leading global investment firm. The company was acquired from a private investor group led by Bain Capital Private Equity and Golden Gate Capital together with GIC, Insight Venture Partners, and Elliott Management. Products and services BMC Software specializes in software designed to enable an autonomous digital enterprise, developing products used for multiple functions including automation, service management, DevOps, workflow orchestration, AIOps, and security. The company supports enterprises using mainframes with its Automated Mainframe Intelligence (AMI) product line, which enables self-managing mainframe systems. Self-managing mainframes use machine learning to improve efficiency by anticipating needs, sending alarms, and taking actions without the need for manual actions. BMC's Control-M software is an application workflow orchestration platform that allows businesses to run hundreds of thousands of batch jobs daily and use the data to optimize complex business operations, such as supply chain management. Users can access all enterprise batch jobs through a single graphical interface. Control-M integrates with distributed storage systems such as