EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases:
From Database to Federation Q1 2012
Report Summary & CA Technologies Profile
Table of Contents
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Executive Introduction...1
Methodology ...1
What is a CMDB/CMS? ...2
The CMDB’s Second Parent ...4
Areas of Evaluation: The CMDB/CMS RFP ...5
Deployment and Administration ...5
Cost Advantage ...5
Architecture and Integration ...6
Functionality ...6
Use-case Priorities ...7
Asset Lifecycle Management ...7
Change Management and Change Impact Analysis ...7
Service Impact Management ...8
Tradeoffs in Evaluation ...8
Quotes from the Trenches ... 10
Vendor Hype, Product Complexity and “Dumbing Down” ... 10
Scope and Administration ... 11
Deployments ... 11
Resistance to Change (Among Other Things) ... 12
Making Integrations Count ... 12
CMDB/CMS for Trending, Problem Solving and Analysis ... 12
A Rainbow of Use Cases ... 12
A Master Functional List for Elite Deployments... 14
General Benefits ... 15
Asset Management and Financial Optimization ... 15
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Asset Management and Financial Optimization ... 16
Change Management and Change Impact Analysis ... 17
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Change Management and Change Impact Analysis ... 18
Service Impact Management ... 19
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Service Impact Management ... 20
Conclusion ... 20
CA Technologies Profile ... 22
Appendix A ... 27
The CMDB/CMS Market in Transition ... 27
Issues and Questions ... 28
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Executive Introduction
This EMA Radar is a follow-on to the EMA report: EMA Radar for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: Innovation Through Diversity, June 2011. The earlier EMA Radar featured eleven non-platform-centric vendors to show how CMDB/CMS technology is diversifying to address new requirements for dynamic currency and more advanced support for analytics and automation. This EMA Radar, with its nine participants, includes BMC, CA, HP and IBM and targets, in particular, the move towards a federated systems anchored more in a service model than in the physical CMDB itself. Just what this service model is and how it relates to the CMDB will remain one of them most compelling and defining questions in service management over, to hazard a gues, at least the next decade.
Five of the vendors with broadly defined use cases and some platform-like capabilities have also been included in this EMA Radar. They are, in alphabetical order: ASG, Axios Systems, iET Solutions, LANDesk and ServiceNow. These companies can also provide continuity, and a point of comparison in positioning across both reports.
The importance of the use-case approach is also critical in understanding CMDB/CMS positioning. As the prior report states, “No one should invest in a CMDB, or begin a (federated) CMS… just to have one. Indeed, the whole notion of a CMDB, and in particular a CMS, is revolutionary exactly because it deconstructs traditional management product assumptions and allows for the reconciliation and effective usage of many different sources of service management information to support virtually all IT processes.”
Both EMA CMDB/CMS Use Case Radars target three critical use cases typical of most CMDB or CMS deployments. These are:
• Asset Management and Financial Optimization • Change Management and Change Impact Analysis • Service Impact Management
These are admittedly broad use cases in themselves. For instance, asset management may range from a reconciled basic asset inventory, to desktop-centric solutions, to those more optimized for the full infrastructure and application portfolio. Change management automation may reflect quite different priorities in terms of domains addressed, compliance and audit priorities, active change and release automation, capacity planning and service impact analysis. Service impact management is perhaps the single most monolithic use case and is designed to test the vendor’s real-time CMDB/CMS awareness as a foundation for performance management and APM in true service-management context.
Methodology
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
It should be pointed out that these are certainly not ALL the players that offer CMDBs. Only five of the eleven vendors from the past participated, based on two primary factors: balanced functionality across all three use cases, and competitiveness in larger enterprises versus lower-end mid-tier or smaller environments. Collectively then, these nine vendors represent a CMDB elite, which is reflected in their clustering across the three use cases.
To complete this research, BMC, CA, IBM and HP each completed a comprehensive questionnaire consisting of more than 100 questions and over 500 data points. ASG, Axios Systems, iET Solutions, LANDesk and ServiceNow each completed a short supplement of eight questions because they had already completed the core questionnaire from the prior research. The supplement targeted a few key areas of concern for platforms including the move towards support for a service model beyond the CMDB for more dynamic data access. All of the nine vendors were interviewed or re-interviewed for current status as the report includes some functionality just available in Q1 2012. EMA also pursued customer interviews whenever available to supplement the dialog and data from the questionnaire. All interviews were kept confidential.
This EMA Radar is specifically intended to provide a useful set of insights into the design points in nine leading CMDB/CMS solutions. And while there will be some sorting based on Value Leader,
Strong Value and Specific Value for each use case, IT and service provider buyers will be well-advised to
first define their objectives and then seek out the solution that fits them best—regardless of apparent “rank” or “award.” With this in mind, EMA has provided a detailed list of evaluation criteria that can be used as a short-hand RFP to map against the vendor profiles contained in the full report. Similarly, the report summary makes every effort to offer high-level insights into design and function for each vendor so that it, too, can be used as a starting point for planning a CMDB/CMS investment.
The survey questions covered the five key functions common to all EMA Radar Reports, which include
Architecture, Functionality, Deployment & Administration, Vendor Strength, and Cost Advantage. EMA has
produced a report targeted at presenting and explaining Radar Reports in general entitled, How to Use the EMA Radar Report,which is available free of charge on the EMA site, www. enterprisemanagement. com. EMA encourages readers of this Radar Report to begin by reading that document.
What is a CMDB/CMS?
(In order to make this report complete, EMA has carried over the following sections from the prior EMA Radar: EMA CMDB/CMS Use Case Radar: Innovation Through Diversity with modest edits, inclusions or deletions for updates. These sections are: What is a CMDB/CMS? Areas of Evaluation: the
CMDB/CMS RFP)
Since EMA began tracking CMDB deployments in 2004 – 2005, it became clear that interest in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) back then was driven by multiple factors – which EMA called the CMDB’s two parents. This dual parentage continues to this day, and remains a source of much confusion in the industry.
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
The following definitions are taken from ITIL v3’s Service Transition.
• Configuration Management Database (CMDB) – A database used to store Configuration Records
throughout their Lifecycle. The Configuration Management System maintains one or more CMDBs; and each CMDB stores Attributes of CIs (Configuration Items) and Relationships with other CIs.
• Configuration Management System (CMS) – A set of tools and databases that are used to manage an
IT Service Provider’s Configuration data. The CMS also includes information about Incidents, Problems, Known Errors, Changes and Releases; and may contain data about employees, Suppliers, locations, Business Units, Customers and Users. The CMS includes tools for collecting, storing, managing, updating, and presenting data about all Configuration Items and their Relationships. The CMS is maintained by Configuration Management and is used by all IT Service Management Processes.
• Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) – A set of tools and databases that are used to manage
knowledge and information. The SKMS includes the Configuration Management System, as well as other tools and databases. The SKMS stores, manages, updates, and presents all information that an IT Service Provider needs to manage the full Lifecycle of IT Services.
Figure 1: The primary goal of ITIL v3’s SKMS is to improve efficiencies by minimizing the need to rediscover knowledge. This is of course a key foundation and driver for CMDB/CMS initiatives, which are fundamental to the success of the SKMS. This graphic
shows an advanced logical model in which a central CMDB is federated with multiple “citizen CMDBs” optimized in content and granularity for separate stakeholder groups, but enjoying a cohesive and reconciled view of services and their interdependencies.
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
The CMDB’s Second Parent
The CMDB’s second parent is primarily architectural, and in many respects foreshadowed in the evolution implied from the CMDB to the CMS to the SKMS. It is a driver associated with the need to assimilate and reconcile different management investments in a manner that supports superior levels of analytics, decision-making and automation. At core, it depends on discovery and modeling technologies to capture interdependencies that are adaptable, flexible and ideally versatile enough to answer requirements for real-time or run-time awareness. It also depends on increasingly dynamic and effective ways for assimilating information from a wide range of other management tools – deconstructing the siloed manner of management tool design in the past to support cross-domain requirements to analyze and optimize information.
This requirement – or at least this dream – has been around for a long time. However, we are really just witnessing the success of first-phase CMDB designs with sufficient technical versatility and adaptability to support meaningful expressions of “truth” without requiring extravagant administrative overhead. The notion that the CMDB is now entering a “mature” phase is therefore naïve, and in many respects refuted by the high levels of innovation attested to in this report. It is probably more accurately in its “toddler phase” regarding technology maturity… on the verge of just learning how to walk!
From an architectural perspective, the CMDB/CMS has become the holy grail suite of foundational services for enabling cohesive, end-to-end service management. And it will continue to evolve substantially as new and better technologies pose more effective ways of resolving this age-old problem. Figure 2 provides an overview of how a CMDB/CMS can become a unified approach to integrating and reconciling different management investments to support a more effective context for managing services and their interdependencies with improved levels of analytics and automation. What EMA once called a “real-time” CMDB in 2006 is emerging in 2011 as a “service modeling schema” that may come in the form of a CMDB, or more often as a reconciled service management dashboard with fully reconciled service models.
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Areas of Evaluation: The CMDB/CMS RFP
Below is a summary of the set of questions used to evaluate the strengths and limitations to help determine the core design point of each of the vendors in this EMA Radar. It can be extracted from this report as a starting point for an RFP for CMDB/CMS deployments in use-case context. The average environment we asked these vendors to measure themselves against was a low-end enterprise, or around 10,000-20,000 CIs.
Deployment and Administration
• Can you describe your best case ROI (including size of environment)? • Do you offer a Proof of Concept? If so, how many days does it typically last?
• What is your average time to deploy on a per use case basis (asset/change/service impact)? ◦ For this we asked the vendors to assume the customer was fully prepared to go forward from
a process and organizational perspective—which is not always the case in actual deployments. • What types of administrative overhead do you normally require for first-phase deployment? For
ongoing administration?
• What types of automation and administrative tools do you offer to support deployments, maintenance and evolution of a CMDB/CMS system? These include, but are not limited to: ◦ Ease of initial CMDB/CMS population
◦ Flexibility and ease of setting policies for discovery and reconciliation ◦ Ease of customizing and extending the reach of out-of-the-box models
◦ Ease of maintaining, updating and validating modeled groups against discovered environments. ◦ Reports to support maintenance, scope, accuracy, and administration of the CMDB/CMS itself ◦ Ease of entering “domain expertise” for CMDB updates
• What professional resources do you provide in terms of both deployment and consulting directly and through partners? How responsive are you to customer issues? What types of customer support groups if any do you offer?
Cost Advantage
• What is your base price for 10,000-20,000 CIs (larger for this initiative) and what is the cost of your HW/SW dependencies?
• What does a real-world average deployment typically cost for your customer set? • What are the most prevalent factors impacting cost?
• Do you offer a SaaS solution? • What is the cost for maintenance? • For core services?
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Architecture and Integration
• Scalability: What is the highest number of CIs you are architected to support? What is the
largest actual deployment? What is the largest number of users you can support? What examples do you have?
• Range of discovery: Can you natively, or through third-party integrations, support discovery for
network (layer 2 and or 3), systems, applications, application components, third-party applications, Web and Web 2.0, storage, database, desktops, mobile devices, and virtualized environments? Can you discover configurations for the above?
• Application dependency: Do you support application dependency mapping, or dependency
mapping in general as either an automated and/or manual process? Does this include to-application, infrastructure-to-infrastructure, to-infrastructure, and/or application-to-application components? Do you do this directly and/or through third-party integration? (Note: All four platform vendors have their own application dependency tools.)
• Reconciliation and normalization: Can you reconcile, normalize and if appropriate synchronize
data from multiple (in-brand and third-party) sources? Can you support weightings for “trusted sources” to prioritize one source over another for a certain CI? Do you provide effective workspaces and analyses for your customers to support data reconciliation and normalization?
• Integration: What types of management data repositories (MDRs) can you access both across
your portfolio and from third-party sources?
◦ Types of sources – management data repositories (MDRs), text records, Excel or other sources imported from own portfolio and third party such as service catalogs, service desks, performance management tools, security tools, asset management tools, and other configuration management tools? What standards are you supporting to enable these integrations? How do you enable them otherwise (e.g. Web Services, API, etc.?) What policies can you apply to federated sources for data access if any? What dashboard integrations can you provide as an extension of your reconciled modeling? How dynamically can you do this? (Note for this EMA Radar EMA pushed hard on exploring the possibilities for federate data access versus importing data into the CMDB itself. This is a highly volatile area in a good sense – with a lot of innovation if not yet a lot of consistency in approach.)
Functionality
• Modeling and Metadata: How versatile and extensible is your modeling to support various CI
relationships, types, classes, sub-classes, attributes, states?
• Analytics: What types of analytics do you offer either directly through the CMDB, or indirectly
through your own portfolio or third-party integrations to support one or more of the three use cases targeted here? This includes if/then change analysis, correlation, data mining, trending among other heuristics.
• Automation: What types of automation can you leverage directly, with or without human
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
• Visualization: What visualization technologies do you support – such as portals, scorecards, Web
access, widgets, etc.? What roles do you support inside and outside of IT? Do you offer specific reports for stakeholders, C.A.B., etc.? How effective is your visualization and reporting (as per demos and user feedback)?
Use-case Priorities
As each use case is a different bubble chart and varies in focus on design point in a number of areas, EMA evaluated weightings for use cases in a number of different ways. One of these was express discussions with both the vendors and their customers on their use-case priorities. In addition, EMA looked at the following factors for the uses cases as indicated below.
Asset Lifecycle Management
• What is your asset management support in terms of scope—e.g., desktops, systems, network, storage, broader infrastructure, applications?
• What is the scope of asset management related disciplines that you can achieve through fully supported integrations either within your own portfolio, or through third-party offerings? These might include: asset/inventory, software asset management (license management), financial planning applications, service or application portfolio planning, vendor management, chargeback and accounting.
• What is the scope of analytics and automation you support for asset management through your own portfolio or third-party integration?
• What is the scope of asset-management-related roles you support directly through your own visualization and reporting?
• What is the scope of professional services and consulting you provide relevant to asset management requirements?
• A trend to blend asset and CI data across platforms—arguments for and against.
Change Management and Change Impact Analysis
• What is the scope of your support for change management and change impact analysis capabilities in terms of desktops, systems, network, storage, broader infrastructure including virtualized and cloud-related environments, applications, facilities, and or other environments?
• What are your strengths and limitations regarding “sorting out” views of CIs based on state? • How detailed and dynamic is your capacity to assess change impact for both planning purposes
(prior to a change) and validation and governance purposes (after a change is made)? • What capabilities do you have to integrate trending and capacity planning?
• What is the scope of analytics and automation you support for change management and change impact analysis through your own portfolio or third-party integration?
• What is the scope of change-management-related roles you support directly through your own visualization and reporting?
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Service Impact Management
• What is your support for service impact management capabilities in terms of scope—e.g., desktops, systems, network, storage, broader infrastructure including virtualized and cloud-related environments, applications, facilities, and or other environments?
• How broadly and efficiently can you access application and infrastructure performance information in order to leverage your CI- and service-related modeling for problem resolution and diagnostics? • Does this include support for service-level management and SLA planning?
• How do you support the balance required between operations and the service desk to do effective service impact management?
• How dynamically can you access relevant CI-related performance information as associated with your service model?
• How effectively do you leverage your configuration insights to optimize your support for service impact management?
• How effectively do you leverage application or other dependency mapping to optimize your support for service impact management?
• Can you integrate event management with your CMDB/CMS? If so, how?
• What is the scope of analytics and automation you support for service impact management through your own portfolio or third-party integration?
• What is the scope of service impact management roles you support directly through your own visualization and reporting?
• What is the scope of professional services and consulting you provide relevant to service impact management?
Tradeoffs in Evaluation
Unfortunately, no amount of analysis can turn unique vendor/ solution footprints into purely linear apples-to-apples comparisons. So once again, we would like to stress the value of looking closely at individual design points ahead of any apparent rankings.
However, to make leveraging this report easier, the following guidelines should prove useful.
• Cost versus function: Needless to say, more often than not greater function comes at greater cost,
albeit this is far from universally true. For the purposes of this evaluation, function came first so that, for instance, if a vendor had a strong application dependency mapping solution its price was added into the core package for evaluation and this generally positioned the vendor more strongly. On the other hand, if a vendor with strong functionality and overall lower cost could match more expensive solutions on per-function/feature basis that was seriously taken into account in price weightings.
• Which functional level to pick: Centering this EMA Radar in platform vendors exposed a problem
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
broad extensible reach across all three use cases based on leveraged or supported integrations across their own portfolios or third-party products. Here the rule of thumb was function first. EMA targeted what it viewed as the richest, logical solution package from a given vendor to support a given use case. Once again, this is why cost and administrative overhead can vary dramatically based on specific use case requirements.
• Use-case shifts in the Cost Efficiency Axis: While some vendor positions remained relatively constant
across all three use-case scenarios, most did not—which raises the question: why if vendor x is a
low-cost and easy to deploy, and vendor y pricey, doesn’t that remain constant in all situations? This would be
true if you viewed the CMDB/CMS investment in isolation. But this is a use-case driven EMA Radar and so EMA factored in administration, and associated costs in getting to the use-case end game very strongly. For instance, some vendors came with design points that played well directly to asset management and had tightly integrated or organic capabilities of their own along those lines. Others were conversely more focused on change and/or capacity optimization and planning. And those who led in service impact were well optimized to assimilate strong real-time operational insights either through their own portfolio or others. This meant that the total cost of ownership was drastically reduced for that use case over, say, asset management for those vendors.
• SaaS versus on premise: EMA didn’t take sides here, but favored vendors that offered a range of
options. However, where SaaS could demonstrate faster deployment times and lower overall administrative requirements—as was often the case—value was given for these specific advantages. In a number of cases, the CMDB is available as an SaaS option as an integrated part of the service desk, whereas application dependency mapping was only available on premise – but there are exceptions on both extremes—e.g. both are SaaS, or both are on-premise only.
• Integration: Since EMA views that assimilating data from multiple sources, including third-party
sources, is central to the CMDB/CMS investment, EMA looked very closely at how the various vendors could reconcile information from multiple management, discovery and other informational sources. However, whether those sources were internal to the vendor’s own portfolio, or third-party sources, was not viewed as of highest importance, with the exception that administration and cost factors were strongly weighted. As a general guideline, any integration that required no more than one consultant for one-to-two days for fully effective and satisfying assimilation into the CMDB/CMS was considered robust enough to count. EMA depended strongly on customer deployments to validate vendor integration claims.
• Technology versus benefits: While EMA advocated a number of core design points as is evident from
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Quotes from the Trenches
Given the breadth and variety of CMDB/CMS deployments, it’s still a “blind man and the elephant” situation with many different views based on objectives, success level, currency and IT maturity level – among just a few of the more salient factors.
Figure 3: The CMDB/CMS, in its state of transformation, has once again become very much a “Blind Man and the Elephant” situation with many differing visions, satisfactions levels, and points of view.
Quotes harvested from real-world deployments from some of the vendors participating in this EMA Radar are featured below.
Vendor Hype, Product Complexity and “Dumbing Down”
• “You can buy wonderful products but they are quite complex. Time is money and all the complexity creates standstill – especially when your vendor doesn’t have time to address your problems.” • “What I really like about this solution is that you can easily shut down 80% of the functionality
to make early phase deployments much easier. Actually, one thing I’d like to see in the industry is dumbing down the CMDB so the average person can use it.”
• “Honestly, configuration management was a real pain three to four years ago, but now the software’s much better and we’re getting very good at it.”
• “There is no perfect software, only perfect salesmen.”
• “One of the mistakes our vendor made was, five years ago, when they sold us the CMDB, they told us it could do anything we wanted it to do. And while this was true at some level, it was largely a false promise. The technology wasn’t really there yet. But a lot of progress has been made since then.” • “In the space of just six days we went from nothing to designing our data model and imported all
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
to Federation Q1 2012 (Summary & CA Technologies Profile)
Scope and Administration
• “We have 50 direct users and about 9,000 indirect users, as our CMDB supports the entire business.” • “I would say that two-thirds of our 300-person IT organization are currently stakeholders of the
larger CMDB/CMS system either directly or indirectly. And interest continues to grow as more and more people in IT begin to realize and see value in accessing information that they didn’t know was there before.”
• “We have about 300 different types of stakeholders defined including business executives, applications management, desktops, servers, mainframes, merger recovery services, facilities planning, and ITIL process owners – just to name a few.”
• “Our Architecture team has grown by leaps and bounds. They generally appoint architects to different technology silos, but I get roped into dialog and planning across silos and report into the service manager.”
• “From an administrative perspective, I oversee the CMDB and I have one full-time person reporting to me. There are about 40–50 stakeholders currently.”
• “I have six people reporting to me directly. One of them is the Configuration Manager who validates the changes and notifies the other five. CMDB administration is not a dedicated role – probably about a third of an FTE.”
• “Right now the full resources specific to administration of the CMDB is about one half of one FTE – that’s me. Fifty percent of my job is CMDB administration along with being the configuration and ITIL lead for our IT organization of 300.”
Deployments
• “From our perspective – we have been very opportunistic – in rolling out the CMDB. We look to address known problems already underway.”
• “We’re incremental in how we try to drive – going forward with small steps on a regular schedule.” • “In administrative overhead, the biggest labor as a service provider with hosted data centers is
onboarding a new account.”
• “Being an old ITIL 1 guy, I knew we needed to know the relationships. We started building the CMDB based around services that we were offering, e.g., the ERP and e-mail applications with its redundant servers. Then we began to tie in the network switches to it, and then who’s going to be affected, where is it located, what are its database or other server interdependencies.”
• “Over the last next three to four years, we’ve expanded our CMDB – putting in, incident, request, problem, change, configuration, and asset management. We’ve also integrated some application management requirements – and now we’re starting a big metrics push.”
• “I think that we have begun to discover the values of federation through trial and error. Most of the capabilities are there in the technology, but our vendor never really told us the WHY – and so we’re kind of getting there on our own.”
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
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Resistance to Change (Among Other Things)
• “A large part of what we do is get people to work with changes – people are always resistant to change. We always get resistance.”
• “Originally there was resistance. But two years later there are no complaints.”
• “The watershed for getting executive support on board is now down between directors and managers. At first it was getting the directors on board and working with them.”
• “The challenge is still making the organization use it. Today we still have some teams that use EXCEL CMDBs and don’t want to use a discovery tool because they don’t trust it.”
• “We had a hard time trying to educate the guys wedded to their server farms who saw their server clusters as the end-all and be-all to the known universe. It was a hard shift, and some of them made it more successfully than others. Some of the more resistant may not be around for too much longer.”
• “I knew that we reduced incidents from badly planned changes leveraging the CMDB. But other people tried to take credit. When something’s going badly there are no takers, but when something’s going better, everybody tries to take credit.”
Making Integrations Count
• “One of the big reasons for going with our vendor was that the integrations were good across both its portfolio and third-party sources.”
• “Our vendor’s is a very open system, which is both good and bad at the same time. But mostly good.”
• “We weren’t going to win the political battle to get people to give up their tools for just one centralized solution. So we needed a CMDB that facilitated and reconciled data from many different sources, many different brands.”
CMDB/CMS for Trending, Problem Solving and Analysis
• “We considered a number of commercial CMDB options. In the end, the CMDB we chose offered what we called “the main knockout” functionality – supporting the creation of configuration snapshots that can be stored and compared to other snapshots.”
• “One of the things I like about our vendor’s CMDB is the accessibility of the information and the capability to create multiple views from multiple perspectives. This is core both to supporting a broad array of stakeholders as well as facilitating the maintenance and administration of the CMDB itself.”
A Rainbow of Use Cases
• “We’re doing asset management and using the system for validation of hosts – to see if our applications are in fact residing where they’re supposed to be. We’re also doing integrated software asset management with Microsoft SW, but adding more details on who the user is, who owns the desktop and who’s paying for it.”
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
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• “We use our CMDB to manage our inventory. If a piece of hardware fails, it’s important to understand whether the failure is an anomaly or part of a trend. Tracking such incidents therefore enables the agency to spot trends to help it better manage its environment.”
• “As a service provider, we use the CMDB internally to keep track and account for devices in our hosting data centers for incident, problem management and change management – especially for our more mature customers. We also use it for asset management in combination with a dedicated asset management product to keep track of all devices, purchase dates, extended warrantees – so that, for instance, we’re not hosting a device if it’s not under warrantee. We run reports on a
customer basis, which can help with everything from billing to infrastructure planning.”
• “Generating compliance reports is also a core value. We’re audited twice a year and need to generate detailed configuration histories to comply with government regulatory requirements.” • “We have a complete approach to application lifecycle management. We leverage the system
both for small adjustments in application requirements, and for full-bore application deployments. By having both pre-production and production in the system, we can easily prioritize issues so we know when the impact is, for instance, hitting many of our customers, versus when systems are down and none of our external customers are impacted.”
• “If necessary, developers can use information from a configuration snapshot to return a system
to a restore point.”
• “The CMDB software supports the ability to generate and maintain snapshots of configuration in time, allowing our agency to better isolate and understand how environment components affect each other, streamlining troubleshooting and diagnosis.”
• “The third big use case is root cause analysis. We are working here in silos. And whenever we want to solve an incident and we don’t know what might be the root cause, we connect to the CMDB and apply its cross-domain perspectives. We can also determine if there is a change that just occurred that might have an impact.”
• “Right now our relationship with monitoring tools is loosely coupled because we’re trying to associate the events within our Incident Management system with CIs in the CMDB.”
• “We have terrific synergy with our core service performance monitoring and management solution – with run-time, or real-time currency across service interdependencies.”
• “If a developer needs to diagnose a problem, we can tap the CMDB to see if there have been changes to the configuration. That information can be very useful in problem diagnosis.”
• “We have to report on any failure within 15 minutes and switch from a live system to Disaster
Recovery mode automatically when that threshold is crossed – and our CMDB will help to enable
that automation.”
• “In order to manage vMotion we needed a solution that was dynamically current and automatic in modeling infrastructure and application interdependencies.”
• “Our CMDB is doing a good job of supporting our migration towards a more fully virtualized
infrastructure. It’s also helping us to cut down on the number of management tools we need.”
EMA Radar™ for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: From Database
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• “We had an opportunity to reinvent change management in our organization and go from a PPM approach that was very ambivalent when it came to execution, to a much more enforceable approach that supported clear ownership and could lead to increased levels of automation.” • “We make sure that every billing parameter – CPU, disk space, and the CMDB- discovered data is
exactly the same. We also use it when we want to plan a big change, a critical change; high impact, including the move to virtualization. We use it every time there’s a critical change to plan. Instead of taking one week or more, it takes five minutes in the CMDB.”
A Master Functional List for Elite Deployments
The nine vendors assessed in this EMA Radar are at the heart of a changing CMDB/CMS market towards a more model-centric and federated universe. The broader challenges of this market are discussed in detail in Appendix A. However, to fully grasp the positioning of vendors in this EMA Radar, as well as to look at a master list of what you can begin to demand in CMDB/CMS deployments, EMA is presenting its Master List of Functional requirements below.
1. Fully supported integrations with Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping Solutions with proven capabilities to administer and leverage these across change impact analysis, service impact analysis, and core audit and compliance requirements.
2. Native integration with Service Catalog so that Services can be defined and captured via the CMDB and published externally via fully reconciled service models and attributes – from costs to dependencies, to SLA requirements, etc.
3. Easily administered out-of-the-box support for “pulling” data in, “pushing” data out, and “accessing” data from federated resources across multiple brands with policies for “trusted source” and support for “provenance.”
4. Fully supported native integrations with automation capabilities from Run-Book to Workflow, to Automated Diagnostics. CMDB/CMS modeling includes libraries of process automation routines that are reusable, and which can be associated with specific CIs.
5. Native integration with Asset Management Inventory, as well as SW License Management. Integrated support for advanced financial planning analytics as they map to lifecycle service management requirements.
6. Fully supported integrations for configuration management solutions across all domains including Network, Systems, Applications, Storage, Desktops and Mobile devices. Detailed configuration data can be federated but reconciled and accessible for top-down troubleshooting and Closed-Loop Incident and Problem Management, or modeled to support Cloud Blueprinting.
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General Benefits
All CMDB/CMS investments support the following generalized benefits if properly deployed and understood.
• Assimilation: Assimilating data from multiple sources, including third-party sources, to optimize
discovery and critical CI information. The power of reconciled sets of information across multiple sources is central to CMDB/CMS deployments with huge values for potentially all of IT and even business professionals in some cases.
• Cohesion: Providing a cohesive and visually compelling foundation for decision-making and
automation. Information without cohesion can be more a negative than a plus. IT professionals have suffered for years from data overload. Having too much information can often be just as bad, and sometimes worse, than having none because it creates the illusion of being informed with no context for decision making or action.
• Communication: Supporting better communication across many multiple stakeholders.
Communication may not sound like a very “hard” value or benefit, but nothing can be further from the truth based on the data in Figure 3. Central to this are cohesive sources of information that can be shared effectively and appropriately across roles. While tools that claim “mean-time-to-innocence” as a value may help an individual operator or even an entire IT silo, they do very little to actually resolve problems across IT, and may even make things worse.
Asset Management and Financial Optimization
EMA research on service-centric asset management underscores the fact that IT organizations are looking for more cohesive approaches to managing assets throughout their lifecycles. And this includes understanding how all assets (capex and opex) relate to the critical business of IT in provisioning and delivering services from a costs/value perspective. Both asset lifecycle management and effective service-centric asset management depend on a strong CMDB/CMS foundation.
Asset management is generally the fastest use case to deploy, as most of its requirements are less time sensitive and at least in initial phases more linear. Having strong support for core technologies such as Software Asset Management (SAM) – an EMA Radar just completed in Q2 2011 – as well as core insights into asset inventory and lifecycle requirements was prioritized in the evaluations here.
Some specific use cases for asset management include:
• Asset and inventory analysis: Time and again IT managers tell EMA, “I vastly underestimated the
problem of getting my arms around what I’ve got. I have multiple discovery systems, but still big holes, all used by different groups…” This most often comes up in broadly based asset management initiatives, but it is relevant to almost all follow-on initiatives described here.
• Asset lifecycle management: Enabling clarity and visibility into asset interdependencies including SLAs,
maintenance windows, and service contracts, is central to managing assets effectively across their lifecycles.
• Compliance audits: These can now be far more effectively automated and structured based on
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• Financial Optimization: Can only occur once assets are understood in the context of the services
they support from an interdependency perspective. Putting dollars-and-cents calculations into these interdependencies still remains something of a black art and to do it fully would require everything from advanced chargeback and demand profiling, to advanced financial planning and project planning analytics, which are well beyond the scope of this assessment. But CMDB/CMS driven asset management initiatives lay the foundation for capturing and analyzing these cost and
value metrics in a substantive and contextually consistent way.
Figure 4: Asset Management and Financial Optimization
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Asset Management and Financial
Optimization
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Change Management and Change Impact Analysis
In many respects, change management is the very heart of the CMDB/CMS value set. This is reflected in the fact that while both asset and service impact had some vendors in the “Specific Value” category, all eleven vendors were “Strong Value” at some level for change management.
Change management for impact analysis of changes to Configuration Items (CIs) and their associated services, as well as change automation for activating changes (release) management more effectively were considered key here, although many vendors were optimized more for one of the two versus both. For instance, change impact management profits from close ties to performance and service impact management, whereas change automation is more workflow centric and often includes Change Advisory Board (C.A.B.) support. Beyond that it can profit from direct ties into other types of automation such as release management for actively making configuration changes to devices, or even runbook or IT Process Automation (ITPA) for closed-loop management of changes in response to incidents or planned requests. With the move to virtualization, the ability to deliver changes in a more automated fashion with a clear eye to service impact is becoming a much requested capability.
EMA combined capacity planning and optimization with change management and change impact analysis – as a closely related use case. This is an often-requested and until recently rarely delivered capability in most CMDB/CMS solutions.
Some specific use cases that are less self evident for change management and change impact analysis include:
• Governance and compliance: Managing change to support security-related, industry-related and other
compliance-driven audits. Governance can also extend to supporting smoother, more efficient, and less disruptive change management processes.
• Service availability and performance: As EMA estimates suggest that roughly 60% of IT service
disruptions come from the impacts of planned or unplanned changes across the application infrastructure, having strong change management governance, plus a solid record of how, by whom, and when changes were made and where they might impact critical services is key. Planning changes for minimal service impact also factors in here.
• Data center consolidation: With the stunning rise of virtualization in the data center, planning new
options for data center consolidation is definitely on the rise. Needless to say, mergers and acquisitions can factor in as a driver for data center consolidation, too.
• Disaster recovery: These initiatives can be an extension of data center consolidation or may be
independent, but automating change in case of disaster is one of the more pervasive drivers for CMDB/CMS initiatives focused on managing change.
• Facilities management and Green IT: This requires dynamic insights into configuration and
“performance” related attributes for CIs both internal to IT (servers, switches, desktops, etc.) and those external to traditional IT boundaries (facilities, power, etc.).
• Support for provisioning new application services: This can include cloud-related service provisioning
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Figure 5: Change Management and Change Impact Analysis
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Change Management and
Change Impact Analysis
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Service Impact Management
While CMDBs grew up with a focus more on process control than on performance management and real-time actions, both technology advances in CMDB/CMS design and new trends such as cloud computing are changing that dramatically. Operational professionals with concerns such as Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) and Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) can benefit greatly from a “reconciled view of truth” including the impacts of change on performance, both of which are ultimately dependent on a dynamic CMDB/CMS foundation.
Some of the more dramatic use cases here include:
• A reconciled view of truth across many multiple sources: One CMDB/CMS initiative reduced
Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) 70% when downtimes costs were estimated at $1 million a minute by providing a more cohesive way of leveraging its many monitoring tools, and consolidating down to a single service desk.
• Reflexive insights into change and configuration for diagnostics: Automating insights between configuration
and change issues and performance issues to support real-time or proactive diagnostics is a core value of a service impact CMDB/CMS.
• Validation that a newly provisioned service is performing effectively (or not): Once a service has been deployed,
this type of reflexive system gives a clear indication of its actual (versus projected) impact on the infrastructure and even more critically, on end user experience.
• Incident and problem management automation and governance: When CMDB/CMS is combined with strong
support ITIL or other workflows and process definitions, it can accelerate time to resolution and harden desired processes so that they are more consistently followed.
• Finding the owner: Automating and securing the process of finding individuals who “own” a
problem or CI, though seemingly trivial, can nevertheless bring significant benefits. One EMA client projected a savings of nearly $100,000 a year just in service desk phone time applied to finding Level 2 or 3 support, which it called Mean-Time-To-Find-Someone (MTTFS).
• Business process and service-specific benefits: Having a cohesive vision of “truth” can bring benefits as
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Figure 6: Service Impact Management
CA Technologies, Value Leader: Service Impact Management
CA Technologies had the second-best score in cost advantage and the third-highest score in overall
functionality in service impact management. In large part CA’s strength is due to a strong portfolio
with a powerful, model-based dashboard integration that’s already proven itself in several years of deployment. This includes native CMDB integrations to CA Service Operations Insight (SOI) and with CA Spectrum, as well as CA Application Performance Management (Wily), CA Infrastructure Performance, CA Infrastructure Insight, CA Database Performance, and CA Application Delivery Analysis. CA Technologies also has established integrations with a wide range of third-party solutions.
Conclusion
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I think it’s safe to say that many of the issues surrounding the CMDB/CMS’s more tarnished reputation have to do with early industry over-hype to very early-phase (a.k.a. “primitive”) solutions. But things really have gotten considerably better since the early 2004–2007 entrants:
• Improvements in deployment, administration and ease-of-use are real and significant – although there’s still a long way to go.
• Discovery solutions, including application dependency mapping capabilities, are becoming “run-time” aware in support of cloud, VMotion and performance management requirements. And in fact cloud deployments when correlated to CMDB/CMS support are the most mature, robust and generally effective of all compared to correlations with more than twelve other service management technologies based on EMA’s quantitative research, Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery, Q1 2012.
• CMDBs are being used more and more effectively not just as a single state view of “what’s true,” but as a platform for analysis and decision support. In some cases with support for “future” or planned states as well as past states through integrations with capacity analytics.
• The evolution of “service models” is extending the reach of the CMDB to participate in a truly operational system of value, something akin to ITIL’s notion of a CMS, or SKMS.
All nine vendor solutions in this EMA Radar were, however, selected for balance, breadth and innovation. They are, in their various ways, an “elite” when it comes to multi-purpose CMDB/CMS capabilities. Last June’s (2011) EMA Radar included other innovative solutions – many of which, however, were more optimized to specific use cases. Together the two Radars present a multi-dimensional portrait of vendor capabilities in 2012.
And while this may seem counterintuitive, I would recommend that any IT evaluations focus more on descriptions and invest in the full report, rather than giving too much credence to a simple two-dimensional use-case representation in the Bubble Charts. While a Bubble Chart, or any two-dimension set of axes, provides a quick visual guide useful as a departure point for surveying the market, it is of frankly limited value in fully evaluating solutions as multi-dimensional as those centered in the CMDB/CMS – many of which are best understood as broader architectural directions rather than simply products.
Moreover this is a changing market with far more innovation than the industry as a whole seems to realize. Just a few examples of “fast movement” are: ASG’s rapid assimilation of PS’Soft to enrich its asset management and financial optimization capabilities; Axios Systems’ far more aggressive pricing model and SaaS offerings; BMC’s dramatic progress in service impact management, and IBM’s growing capabilities to support fast-time-to-value and heightened cost efficiencies in asset and change management.
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CA Technologies Profile
Introduction
CA Technologies enjoyed an unusually strong showing in this radar with a “Value Leader” position in all three use cases. This success grew in part out of the company’s commitment to “help organizations implement CMBD/CMS with relative ease… and to tie CMDB/CMS effectively into the client’s overall service management efforts.” Its radar positions reflect a uniquely strong balance between cost effectiveness, design and functionality.
CA’s CMDB offering includes CMDB Manager, Common Asset Viewer, CI Reconciliation, CI Repository, Visualizer, CA Configuration Automation, Reporting, the Universal Federation Adapter, out-of-the-box integration with CA Service Desk Manager, CA Client Automation, CA Server Automation. Not directly included in CA Service Desk Manager, but a part of this evaluation, are CA Spectrum, CA Service Catalog and CA IT Asset Manager. Within this list, CA Configuration Automation should also be noted as CA’s application dependency mapping solution—initially called “Cohesion” from the Cohesion acquisition.
CA Technologies packages its CMDB as a part of its CA Service Desk Manager with a focus on quick time to value and strong links to operations as well as service desk requirements.
Use-case Perspectives
Service Impact Management – Value Leader
CA Technologies was a Value Leader in Service Impact Management – with the second best score in Cost Advantage and the third highest score in overall Functionality. As a result, CA Technologies has the single most balanced position of leadership in Service Impact Management.
In large part this is due to a strong portfolio with powerful, model-based dashboard integration that’s already proven itself in several years of deployment. This includes native CMDB integrations to CA Service Operations Insight (SOI) and with that CA Spectrum, as well as CA Application Performance Management (Wily),
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Change Management and Change Impact Analysis – Value Leader
CA Technologies was a Value Leader in Change Management and Change Impact Analysis thanks to a number of capabilities. These include application discovery and dependency mapping through CA Configuration Automation, CA Server Automation, CA Client Automation, CA Virtual Automation targeted at configuration for virtualized infrastructures, and CA Process Automation for accelerating complex provisioning and other tasks.
Also brand new as of Q4 2011, CA introduced automated capabilities for network configuration – CA Network Automation—through a worldwide agreement with Infoblox to resell its NetMRI solution.
CA’s acquisition of Hyperformix provides strong complementary analytics for understanding how capacity and performance issues can be assessed as an extension of change management and change impact analysis requirements. Finally, CA’s strengths in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) through its CA Clarity PPM product can support both change management and asset management requirements.
Asset Management and Financial Optimization – Value Leader
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Deployment and Administration
CA estimates strong value for deployments within three months to six months for mid-tier enterprises focusing early phase use cases such as change impact analysis for infrastructure planning – e.g. data center consolidation. This was largely borne out in dialogs with CA customers. CA also estimates about a .5 to 1 full time employee commitment to its CMDB administration. Once again, this was borne out in customer dialogs. CA’s heavy use of templates for administration and its focus on packaging that favors quick time to value was clearly a part of CA’s radar success.
Cost Advantage
The basic list price for a CA Service Desk Manager installation for twenty-five users at full functionality is around $140,000. This includes CMDB support with no limit on the number of CIs. CA does not offer its CMDB as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) option. Basic list costs for CA Configuration Automation for application dependency mapping are generally between $150K and $200K, although Service Desk Manager customers will get a significant discount. CA maintenance fees fall between 19% and 22% of product costs.
Architecture and Integration
Among the many features of CA’s CMDB/CMS architecture, the following highlights stand out:
• Scalability: The CA CMDB is a very scalable system with support for more than ten million CIs
and existing deployments with hundreds of thousands of CIs. CA’s CMDB can support more than 100 users out of the box. Multitenancy also allows for multiple organizations or customers to be supported through a single CMDB.
• Breadth of support: CA Technologies can discover not only a broad array of infrastructure and
application interdependencies, but also mobile and desktop devices through its integrated portfolio and/or third party sources. The vendor however does not yet offer configuration management support for mobile devices.
• Reconciliation and data access: MDR reconciliation treats each supported Management Data Repository
(MDR) as a trusted source that always uses the same federated asset ID when it communicates information about a specific CI across the Configuration Management System (CMS). This allows for versatile, federated deployments with the potential for real-time, dynamic updates. The MDR Launcher also helps to facilitate more dynamic data exchange across the federated CMS.
• Staging and normalization: The Transaction Work Area (TWA) provides a kind of staging area where
data and updates can be stored for analysis before actively populating the CMDB. This helps to prevent false positives (multiple representations of the same CI) and false negatives (multiple CIs getting lost under the same identifier); so that data can be normalized and cleaned before changes to the CMDB are made. CA Technologies also offers an “Ambiguity Index” in the TWA to help facilitate the process of capturing duplicate or missing CIs.
• Third-party support: CA Technologies offers a variety of integration options for third-party solutions
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include solutions from IBM (Tivoli Monitoring, Tivoli Netcool Omnibus, Tivoli Enterprise Portal), Microsoft SCOM and SCCM, NetApp SAN Screen, BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Remedy, and the BMC Service Request Manager. In addition, CA Technologies routinely supports integrations with IBM Maximo for asset management and service desk, Symantec Altiris, and LANDesk.
Functionality
Once again, here are a few areas of standout functionality in CA’s support for CMDB/CMS initiatives.
• Modeling: CA Technologies has simplified modeling so that no coding is required. That way
administrators can easily extend service models to support new classes, attributes, and dependencies. This has become extremely important in IT deployments where virtualization and cloud figure squarely in the overall picture, as cloud poses new requirements for naming conventions and relationships.
• Future state: CA Technologies not only supports discovered, approved and historical CI states, but
can also assign future-state conditions to CIs or CI groups or clusters. Once again this can become especially important in provisioning cloud services or virtualized infrastructures.
• Analytics: From an analytics perspective, CA Technologies offers if/then change impact
analysis, correlation and root cause analysis. Its Visualizer capability for seeing and analyzing interdependencies can provide significant added value in support of these analytic requirements.
• Automation: CA Technologies has one of the most evolved automation portfolios in the industry
today—targeted at cloud, virtualized, hybrid and traditional service infrastructures. Many of these are mentioned in the Change Management and Change Impact Analysis Use Case above.
• Stakeholder support: Out of the box CA Technologies supports eighteen well defined roles or
stakeholders across IT, as well as business-related stakeholders for its Service Desk Manager/ CMDB combination.
Vendor Strength
CA Technologies is a global leader in service management, with positive commitments to grow in key areas relevant to this radar. It has particular strengths in financial services, healthcare, government, telecommunications, and retail among other verticals. Its partnerships include systems integrators, global consulting companies, technical partners, MSPs, and other services-related areas.
Strengths and Limitations
Strengths
• CA’s commitment to price effectiveness and time to value is pervasive. • CA’s support for Service Impact Management is mature and versatile.
• CA Technologies has been a leader in the move to the federated Configuration Management System (CMS) thanks in part to its Unified Service Model (USM) initiative as well as consolidated model-driven suites such as Service Operations Insight.
• CA’s support for desktop and mobile devices in terms of discovery and configuration (for desktops) significantly extend the value of its CMDB investment in many IT organizations.
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Limitations
• CA’s packaging of its CMDB only as an extension of its Service Desk Manager can be a negative when CA Technologies is the core strategic choice but another service desk is already entrenched and deployed.
• In spite of Configuration Automation, discovery requirements can become complex given the breadth of product capabilities potentially involved – including CA Spectrum network discovery, CA Application Performance transaction discovery and CA IT Asset Manager – not to mention third-party discovery systems such as Microsoft SCOM.
• As with most other vendors, unsupported third-party integrations can be a challenge.
Customer Quotes
• “CA’s CMDB solution is very good. Right now I only need about a third of an FTE for CMDB-related administration.”
• “We looked at HP and BMC as well, but selected CA because it was more cost-effective primarily, but also because of its strengths in support for operations as well as service desk. Finally, while CA had a lot of richness, you could turn a lot of it off to get started. You didn’t have to become overwhelmed with complexity on Day One.”
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Appendix A
The CMDB/CMS Market in Transition
On the one hand, many in the industry have begun to dismiss the CMDB as well past its prime, at least in terms of industry hype and attention. For this rather significant population, the CMDB has evolved into a complex and demanding data store with tangible but difficult-to-justify benefits, with questionable relationships to cloud computing and other more dynamic technologies and trends. On the other hand, EMA has seen consistent and often dramatic interest in the CMDB/CMS – as a gathering storm in transition. The challenges have been and remain- how to characterize this “gathering storm.” The combined acronym CMDB/CMS even as used here does little more than raise a question. What is it we’re really talking about? A physical data store? A logical Model? Or an entire “system” of solutions federated to support a more contextual approach to service management. And while EMA has always argued (even before ITIL introduced the notion of the CMS) that this “federated system” was really the core idea—the word “system” itself is an ambivalent one.
The truth is, however, that the industry really is at a turning point in this CMDB/CMS question mark, and that cloud computing is actually helping to drive the requirements for a contextually oriented service management system forward. In EMA data from December, 2011, IT organizations with CMDBs deployed in part to support cloud-related initiatives were categorically more mature and effective in assimilating cloud technologies—both internal and external – in support of the delivery of critical business services.
However to achieve the full value of what I will call for now the “intelligent service model” a number of things still remain to be done.
• The industry as a whole must more aggressively decouple the logical and extensible service model itself from its physical database implementation. In data management terms, the CMDB data architecture is complex, with a core model of service topology serving as an essential master data store. That core model – essentially a skeleton - almost always must be physically centralized, but ancillary stores may contain much supplementary data linked to the core objects.
I would shy away from promoting the service model ONLY as logical because it has attributes that require dynamic updates from critical sources, dynamic capabilities for accessing data across all of IT, and can itself be leveraged by advanced analytic tools that can harvest the contextual information it provides. It must be able to link automation routines and other IT processes to CIs, and as it matures will take on more the characteristics of a dynamic organism that feeds, grows and informs than a passive, logical entity.