
For 45 years BMC has been the software running quietly behind banks, airlines and mainframes. Now, owned by KKR and split into two companies, it is betting that boring, dependable automation is exactly what agentic AI needs.
BMC Software is a Houston-founded enterprise software company that builds the IT operations, service management, and mainframe automation tools that keep large organizations running. Founded in 1980 by three former Shell engineers, BMC has spent four decades turning the unglamorous work of keeping systems alive - monitoring, scheduling, patching, recovering - into automated, increasingly AI-driven products. Its flagship lines include Control-M (workload automation), the BMC AMI mainframe suite, and BMC Helix (service and operations management). Owned by KKR since 2018, BMC split into two focused companies, BMC and BMC Helix, in early 2025.