BMC Software Sues ServiceNow for Patent Infringement

BMC Software Inc. (BMC) this week said it’s taking its rival ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) to court for patent infringement.

The Houston-based IT business management solutions provider claims ServiceNow — a Santa Clara, California-based company with similar offerings — is violating seven of its patents through several products in the ServiceNow portfolio, including incident management and problem management; performance analytics; configuration management, including ServiceNow’s configuration management database (CMDB); discovery; orchestration; and change and release management

“BMC Software’s primary goal, on behalf of our owners, investors, employees, customers and partners, in moving forward with this lawsuit is to protect our foundational technology,” said Patrick Tagtow, general counsel at BMC.

He added: “These are innovations born of our many long, hard years of effort and billions of dollars in research and development expenditures and acquisitions, and must be safeguarded from those who would try to make them their own.”

Tagtow said the lawsuit isn’t tied to any particular event. Instead, the complaint is based on a pattern of behavior and the business practices of ServiceNow.

“As we’ve observed ServiceNow, they began to look more and more like BMC in their offerings,” he said. “Based on that, we engaged in a very thorough review of our broad patent portfolio of hundreds of awarded patents and compared them in detail to the ServiceNow offerings and concluded that while ServiceNow has zero patents of their own, they are in fact broadly infringing on many of BMC’s patent.”

In response to the lawsuit, ServiceNow Public Relations Director Colleen Haikes gave a statement to MSPmentor: “We have just received a copy of the complaint and are evaluating the claims. We intend to vigorously defend the lawsuit.”

“We have great faith in the court system and are fully committed to prosecute this case,” Tagtow said. “Beyond that, we expect that we will continue to evolve and innovate; it’s what we do well and what our customers expect from us.”

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