BMC Software flings patent sueball at ServiceNow

Newly private BMC Software is taking ServiceNow to court, claiming its up-and-coming enterprise help-desk rival trampled over its sacred patents. BMC has accused ServiceNow of violating seven of its patents (5,978,594, 6,816,898, 6,895,586, 7,062,683, 7,617,073, 8,646,093 and 8,674,992), spanning incident management, …

[Longrod_von_Hugendong]

BMC Software...?

Used to have a BMC car, that was shit to.

[Mark 85]

Sueballs can only mean a couple of things

Either they are really worried about the competition or they're sliding downhill and figure a lawsuit is good for the bottom line.

I've not been overly impressed with their products, though they do seem to work ok. It could have been our implantation of them.

[Roland6]

Re: Sueballs can only mean a couple of things

Also they could mean that ServiceNow have technology that BMC would like to use but would rather access via a licensing agreement on terms that ServiceNow are not willing to agree to.

A quick look through the patents, seem to indicate that only one (US 8,674,992) could be regarded as new and novel (ie. a known information display method being implemented for the first time in a service management system), as the claims in each are very generic. So the question is whether a lot of developers moved from BMC to ServiceNow and hence SerivceNow have implemented these methods in an identical way to BMC. Given the amount of prior art (several of BMC's own products predate the patents being asserted) it will be interesting to see what happens, but don't be surprised if the outcome is a licensing agreement with token amounts of money actually changing hands.

[Frederic Bloggs]

The NHS?

Really? And this is an endorsement?

[Dave K]

Well, I've used BMC Remedy and it was absolutely bloody awful. I was thoroughly delighted when the time came for me to leave the company that used that awful pile of crap. Now, the current company I work for uses ServiceNow. It's not perfect, but it's a thousand times better than Remedy IMO.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've used BMC Remedy and it was absolutely bloody awful

That seems a little unfair on Remedy. Calling it "bloody awful" vastly underestimates the improbable and staggering tower of shit that BMC managed to stack up and call a product.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remedy v ServiceNow

My company moved from Remedy (we'd fallen a few versions back and it was going to cost a fortune to get up to date) and went to Service Now

From my experience, it's different flavours of shite

[NumptyScrub]

Re: Remedy v ServiceNow

Crappacino vs a cafe shatté, as it were?

[John G Imrie]

I asked a wise man what was the greatest joy in fighting patent trolls

He replied that it was ..

To crush their patents -- See their objections driven from the court before you, and to hear the lamentation of their lawyers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple solution

You want patent protection but not trolls, well sorry to inform you but they come with the territory, it is either both or none.

[pierce]

we switched from remedy to SNow, and SNow is AWFUL.

[frank ly]

I'm really wondering

" ... incident management, performance analytics, configuration management, discovery, orchestration and change release management."

These are 'technology'? How?

[Otto is a bear.]

Ah but

The management reporting looks really good, and that's what matters.