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BMC Software Inc. on Monday became one of the earliest of the big four enterprise management players to launch a configuration management database.
Following on the heels of CMDB updates from smaller vendors Collation Inc. and nLayers Inc., BMC released its Atrium CMDB as part of its Business Service Management initiative.
BMC Atrium CMDB is a common repository that holds data on the configuration and relationships between IT infrastructure elements. It provides a shared service model and common user and reporting interfaces that can be exploited by management applications from different disciplines.
The aim of BMCs BSM initiative is to help determine “what is the impact on the business of the way IT operates and how can IT align to support critical business processes,” said Erik Wrobel, marketing manager of enabling technologies at BMC in Sunnyvale, Calif.
“IT needs to understand how planned changes will impact critical business processes and business applications. It needs to translate business goals into IT,” he added.
Although the Atrium CMDB is built on the Remedy Action Request System, which BMC extended to include a new patent-pending Reconciliation Engine, it is a brand-new architecture designed from the ground up to address the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) requirement for a single enterprise CMDB, Wrobel said.
BMC is working to integrate its product families with the CMDB. Toward that end, BMC also announced Remedy ARS 6.3 and Remedy IT Service Management Suite 6.0, which can leverage information in the CMDB so that all IT processes can be managed from a business perspective, according to Wrobel. BMC has already integrated its new IT Discovery suite, and Service Impact Manager with the Atrium CMDB.
Both BMC and rival Hewlett-Packard Co., with its OpenView unit, are addressing a broader enterprise perspective with their CMDB efforts, according to Ronni Colville, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.
“The CMDB from BMC and HP is a broader view of what Collation is doing. Collation is doing a small one for the data center,” she said.
Colville said she thinks there will be significant growth in the CMDB area in the next couple of years because the technology appeals to a range of buyers.
“Theres the asset management person, the data center person who wants an effective data center, the architect who wants a view for compliance, and then theres the change management people doing ITIL certification,” she said. “This is a big deal.”
The BMC Atrium CMDB will ship at the end of this month.