Johanna Ambrosio

If you want to waltz with your Roomba or remotely control your flying AR Drone, there's an online store that sells apps that let you do those things, and more. In fact, there are more than 300 apps available at the new site RobotAppStore.com.

The e-marketplace -- the brainchild of longtime robotics enthusiast, programmer and innovator Elad Inbar -- is unabashedly modeled after other online app stores. With over 20 million domestic robots in use, Inbar said, there's a natural market for robot-related apps,just as there are markets for games and other apps.

The big game is on -- and by that, we don't mean football, basketball, baseball or Angry Birds. We're talking about the biggest pastime in the U.S.: Watching (and taking part in) the current Republican primaries and the upcoming presidential elections.

After all, what could be more exciting? There's a president under fire from both sides of the aisle, a group of opposition contenders who are hurling more mud at each other than you'll find in a swamp and a media that's eager to publicize every misstatement and accusation.

As if managing your current IT operations wasn't challenging enough, along comes cloud computing to plaster on another layer of complexity. How does your current management strategy need to evolve to support private cloud? How do you seamlessly control a hybrid private-public cloud? No one has all the answers, but BMC Software -- a champion of the concept of business service management -- is moving aggressively toward making cloud just another service option to be managed, like networking, storage and applications. In this installment of the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp spoke with IDGE Chief Content Officer John Gallant and Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Scot Finnie and Technologies Editor Johanna Ambrosio about BMC's cloud strategy, why BMC thinks IBM and HP are the wrong answer for management buyers, and how BMC's acquisitions have positioned the company to dominate the evolving management market. BMC's chief technology officer, Kia Behnia, also took part in this discussion.

(Read more from the IDG Enterprise CEO Interview Series, including Q&As with Cisco CEO John Chambers, Riverbed CEO Jerry Kennelly and SAS CEO Jim Goodnight.)