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BMC Software Inc. last week sewed together more components of its Business Service Management initiative with the launch of new automated discovery and service model creation tools for its Service Impact Manager.
BMC at its BSM Executive Event in New York introduced SIM Version 5.0, which adds BMCs Configuration Management Database integrated with tools that keep track of dependencies among IT infrastructure elements and how they fit together to deliver IT services.
The Houston companys BSM strategy is intended to help IT move from a silo approach to management to a process focused on solving IT infrastructure problems according to their impact on business.
To that end, the BSM initiative incorporates IT management processes defined in the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), which BMC officials said is catching on in IT shops as a means to better manage IT service delivery.
“Its more than just hype. Theres reality to it,” said BMC user Joe Furmanski, technical project director for the eRecord program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “Were in the planning stages for ITIL implementation. Over the next year, we will implement [ITIL] across our information divisions,” Furmanski said.
“ITIL divides service management into service delivery and service support. Its our job to connect service delivery to IT processes around help, incident, asset, change and configuration management. Now we will give a prioritized view of attacking problems,” said Mary Nugent, vice president and general manager of BMCs Service Management Solutions Division.
The existing version of SIM requires users to manually create the service model, which “took too long to create and was hard to maintain,” said Nugent. Version 5.0 adds a pair of new discovery tools that “prepopulate the model with discovered information that the customer doesnt have to manually load,” she said.
The Discovery Express tool “goes out and finds assets on whatever part of the network you ask it to scan. It finds and loads that asset information into the configuration management database,” said Nugent. A new Marimba Configuration Discovery capability adds detailed data on server configuration, such as operating system and patch level, to the configuration database to keep track of assets in their current state.
The Configuration Management Database included in SIM 5.0 is built on the Remedy Action Request System workflow environment, which underlies the Remedy IT Service Management suite. SIM 5.0 is due in December.