1. BMC Release Lifecycle Management (RLM) is our suite targeted at managing and automating application releases for Release Managers and Application Release Automation teams. The suite includes BMC Release Process Management (RPM), BMC Release Package and Deployment (RPD) and BMC Application Automation (BAA).
Our goal is to eventually unify the RPM and RPD capabilities into a single unified codebase. For this reason, you will see RPD features making their way into RPM over time. Currently, RPD is better at creating packages and managing application packages (one version of one component). Currently, RPM is better at managing the full release of complex applications across multiple stages of environments. Until the merge of RPM and RPD is complete, I recommend that you use the RLM suite- RPM for your release process and RPD for your application component packaging and deployment.
2. BMC Application Automation (BAA) is just a license included in the BMC Release Lifecycle Management SKU that allows you to use BMC Server Automation's RSCD agents and Network Shell (NSH). Those components are used for connecting to remote targets for application deployments as well as many other use cases like patching and compliance. Because of the flexibility across use cases, strong access controls and proven record in some of the worlds largest data centers; those components are our recommended method for connecting to remote targets. For example, if we have a customer that is using BMC's solutions for Application Release Automation and Compliance, they do not want us to use two agents. For those reasons, the 'legacy' Varalogix bridge is going to be phased out.
BMC Middleware Automation (BMA) is a tool that enables a middleware administrators to manage their configurations at scale across hundreds or even thousands of nodes (ex. WebSphere, WebLogic, Jboss, etc.). The goal of BMA is to increase your ratio of nodes/domains manage per admin with more consistent, agile changes, less errors and faster meant time to repair (MTTR). Typically, middleware admins manually configure one node/domain and then they use BMA to snapshot that configuration, tokenize the configuration, and install it as a "golden configuration" across all the nodes/domains. The BMA drift and compare capabilities can be very useful for identifying, tokenizing and deploying changes as one aspect of an application release. Some of our customers that are using both RLM and BMA combines these capabilities into their release process.