This is Chris P, reporter on this story. What has been your experience working with a CMDB in your data center? Are you in the process of testing one, or are you actually using one in daily production? Are you realizing the cost savings that the manufacturer sold you? Let us know.

/cp

Chris I think you've misquoted the paper. the savings are a million over three years not per year.

And despite your excellent disclosure section at the start I think you've missed some serious misrepresentations in the paper. See http://www.itskeptic.org/node/709

This is CP, reporter on this story. I was uncomfortable about this story form the beginning, thus the "disclosure" note near the top. But I just hadn't seen much ROI info on CMDBs and figured at least it was a start to a conversation among companies thinking about investing in them.

I've had some really thoughtful offline responses to this story already, including the view that so much of CMDB information has not been proven in production situations that there is no way accurate projections on ROI and business viability can be made. On paper, they sure look interesting.

Also, we need to remember that this whole research job is designed to offer as best a projection as possible on ROI, and nothing else.

Forrester Research is a firm I trust to get at the truth, so when I saw they were doing the study, I felt a little better. But still, having a company (BMC) pay for research it really wants to see is a conflict of interest no matter how you look at it. You usually get what you pay for, and BMC did just that.

Take the info at face value, discard it, whatever. The conversation has hereby started. That's a big part of our job here at eWEEK.

/cp