BMC Software - Assets

Assets

While BMC's most significant asset is perhaps a workforce of skilled software engineers, the firm owns considerable intellectual property in the form of software code. It elaborated how it protects this property in an SEC filing (2002): "We distribute our products in object code form and rely upon contract, trade secret, copyright and patent laws to protect our intellectual property. The license agreements under which customers use our products restrict the customer's use to its own operations and prohibit disclosure to third persons. We now distribute certain of our products on a shrink-wrap basis, and the enforceability of such restrictions in a shrink-wrap license is unproven in certain jurisdictions. Also, notwithstanding those restrictions, it is possible for other persons to obtain copies of our products in object code form. We believe that obtaining such copies would have limited value without access to the product's source code, which we keep highly confidential. In addition, we employ protective measures such as CPU dependent passwords, expiring passwords and time-based trials."

While software can be considered as intellectual property like screenplays and protected by copyrighting, some software processes can be considered as "inventions" and protected by patent. BMC owns software patents. For example, BMC owns a patent for "GUI interpretation technology for client/server environment" developed by software engineers David T. Sulcer, Lawrence M. Ackner, and Donna S. Lowe-Cleveland which involves complex signals processing; patent attorneys trying to describe this process wrote: "receiving a message from a remote device, the message comprising either a definition, a state change, a command or some combination thereof; processing the definition (if any) before the state change (if any); and processing the state change (if any) before processing the command (if any)."

BMC owns real estate property but it's mostly in four office buildings totaling 1,515,000 square feet (140,700 m2) in Houston, Texas; sales and development offices around the world are leased.