The effort is being touted by some as a major step toward heterogeneous IT service management (ITSM) by some, but others are taking the news with a dose of “wait-and-see” skepticism.

For consortium participants—HP, IBM, BMC Software and Fujitsu Limited, as well as CA—the decision to pursue standards was influenced in large part by customers’ demands for the ability to share data that currently is scattered across organizations and resides in different vendors’ CMDBs and other tools.

“There was clearly the internal realization that we need this, and part of it was customers telling us that they’re not interested in paying consultants large amounts of money just to integrate management products, said William Vambenepe, distinguished technologist in the office of the CTO of the HP OpenView Business Unit.

"The other part is, you can’t build a highly scalable and very dynamic solution if you have to keep building adapters every time you bring in a new product … There’s no way we can deliver on the objectives we have if we don’t have the level of simplification that comes from standards on top of which we can build all of the automation we want.”

The consortium will focus on the development of an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between CMDBs and other data repositories. The objective is to provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications and middleware.

According to Ric Telford, vice president of standards for IBM Tivoli, true ITSM requires integration not only at the process and technology levels, but also at that data level. And while individual CMDB solutions will go a long way toward that integration, they will never be 100%.

“There will always be more than one vendor for key data sources. That’s what led us to the standards,” he said. “Whenever you have data in heterogeneous systems, it calls for standards.”

The Current State of CMDB

The CMBD concept is relatively simple: create a central location for storing basic records related to configuration items—servers, routers, desktops, business processes, etc.—in an organization’s production environment and the relationship between those items.

By creating a single source of configuration information for every component of the enterprise, IT managers can use the CMDB to see the relationship between those components and predict how a change to one will affect the others, as well as the applications they serve. This, in turns, allows them to make better technology decisions to support business initiatives.

“While the good news is that seemingly almost daily a new vendor is claiming to offer a CMDB or CMDB strategy, the bad news is that very few of them offer comprehensive DMDB capability and none have proven multi-vendor federation capability,” write Gartner analysts Ronni Colville and Cameron Haight in research titled Consortium Launches New Effort to Develop CMDB Federation Standards .

Gartner expects that most global 2000 organizations will need to federate between three-to-seven data sources. Further, over the next three years, because at least 25% of those organizations will be implementing CMDB initiatives without proper planning and organizational alignment, the end result will be grassroots initiatives in various departments, such as asset, data center, networking and service desk, creating multiple CMDB silos.

Driven in part by customer demand and in part by the need to advance individual business strategies, several leading software management vendors have teamed up to develop standards to define federation of configuration data into configuration management databases (CMDBs).

The effort is being touted by some as a major step toward heterogeneous IT service management (ITSM) by some, but others are taking the news with a dose of “wait-and-see” skepticism.

For consortium participants—HP, IBM, BMC Software and Fujitsu Limited, as well as CA—the decision to pursue standards was influenced in large part by customers’ demands for the ability to share data that currently is scattered across organizations and resides in different vendors’ CMDBs and other tools.

“There was clearly the internal realization that we need this, and part of it was customers telling us that they’re not interested in paying consultants large amounts of money just to integrate management products, said William Vambenepe, distinguished technologist in the office of the CTO of the HP OpenView Business Unit.

"The other part is, you can’t build a highly scalable and very dynamic solution if you have to keep building adapters every time you bring in a new product … There’s no way we can deliver on the objectives we have if we don’t have the level of simplification that comes from standards on top of which we can build all of the automation we want.”

The consortium will focus on the development of an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between CMDBs and other data repositories. The objective is to provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications and middleware.

According to Ric Telford, vice president of standards for IBM Tivoli, true ITSM requires integration not only at the process and technology levels, but also at that data level. And while individual CMDB solutions will go a long way toward that integration, they will never be 100%.

“There will always be more than one vendor for key data sources. That’s what led us to the standards,” he said. “Whenever you have data in heterogeneous systems, it calls for standards.”

The Current State of CMDB

The CMBD concept is relatively simple: create a central location for storing basic records related to configuration items—servers, routers, desktops, business processes, etc.—in an organization’s production environment and the relationship between those items.

By creating a single source of configuration information for every component of the enterprise, IT managers can use the CMDB to see the relationship between those components and predict how a change to one will affect the others, as well as the applications they serve. This, in turns, allows them to make better technology decisions to support business initiatives.

“While the good news is that seemingly almost daily a new vendor is claiming to offer a CMDB or CMDB strategy, the bad news is that very few of them offer comprehensive DMDB capability and none have proven multi-vendor federation capability,” write Gartner analysts Ronni Colville and Cameron Haight in research titled Consortium Launches New Effort to Develop CMDB Federation Standards .

Gartner expects that most global 2000 organizations will need to federate between three-to-seven data sources. Further, over the next three years, because at least 25% of those organizations will be implementing CMDB initiatives without proper planning and organizational alignment, the end result will be grassroots initiatives in various departments, such as asset, data center, networking and service desk, creating multiple CMDB silos.

Driven in part by customer demand and in part by the need to advance individual business strategies, several leading software management vendors have teamed up to develop standards to define federation of configuration data into configuration management databases (CMDBs).

The effort is being touted by some as a major step toward heterogeneous IT service management (ITSM) by some, but others are taking the news with a dose of “wait-and-see” skepticism.

For consortium participants—HP, IBM, BMC Software and Fujitsu Limited, as well as CA—the decision to pursue standards was influenced in large part by customers’ demands for the ability to share data that currently is scattered across organizations and resides in different vendors’ CMDBs and other tools.

“There was clearly the internal realization that we need this, and part of it was customers telling us that they’re not interested in paying consultants large amounts of money just to integrate management products, said William Vambenepe, distinguished technologist in the office of the CTO of the HP OpenView Business Unit.

"The other part is, you can’t build a highly scalable and very dynamic solution if you have to keep building adapters every time you bring in a new product … There’s no way we can deliver on the objectives we have if we don’t have the level of simplification that comes from standards on top of which we can build all of the automation we want.”

The consortium will focus on the development of an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between CMDBs and other data repositories. The objective is to provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications and middleware.

According to Ric Telford, vice president of standards for IBM Tivoli, true ITSM requires integration not only at the process and technology levels, but also at that data level. And while individual CMDB solutions will go a long way toward that integration, they will never be 100%.

“There will always be more than one vendor for key data sources. That’s what led us to the standards,” he said. “Whenever you have data in heterogeneous systems, it calls for standards.”

The Current State of CMDB

The CMBD concept is relatively simple: create a central location for storing basic records related to configuration items—servers, routers, desktops, business processes, etc.—in an organization’s production environment and the relationship between those items.

By creating a single source of configuration information for every component of the enterprise, IT managers can use the CMDB to see the relationship between those components and predict how a change to one will affect the others, as well as the applications they serve. This, in turns, allows them to make better technology decisions to support business initiatives.

“While the good news is that seemingly almost daily a new vendor is claiming to offer a CMDB or CMDB strategy, the bad news is that very few of them offer comprehensive DMDB capability and none have proven multi-vendor federation capability,” write Gartner analysts Ronni Colville and Cameron Haight in research titled Consortium Launches New Effort to Develop CMDB Federation Standards .

Gartner expects that most global 2000 organizations will need to federate between three-to-seven data sources. Further, over the next three years, because at least 25% of those organizations will be implementing CMDB initiatives without proper planning and organizational alignment, the end result will be grassroots initiatives in various departments, such as asset, data center, networking and service desk, creating multiple CMDB silos.

A Proactive Approach

Consortium participants hold that creating an industry standard for federation and accessing IT information will facilitate communication between CMDBs, streamlining what is now a largely manual process.

With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access configuration data, organizations can use their CMDBs to create a more complete and accurate picture of IT information spread out across multiple data sources.

This will make it easier to keep track of changes to an IT environment and help organizations better understand the impact of changes they make to the IT environment.

“In a nutshell, they’ll have the capability to start to get an aggregated view of all their key IT information, regardless of whether it’s stored in the same company repository or not,” said IBM’s Telford. “In the meantime, if that data can be integrated and federated, it can be used in integrated solutions that they’ll be able to implement with ITSM, like having an integrated process model for change deployment or availability management.”

For the vendors, the ability to work from a set of industry standards will allow them to advance their individual ITSM initiatives by developing solutions that can truly optimize, automate and align processes.

Reserved Optimism

The idea behind vendor-driven CMBD standards has been received enthusiastically from only some industry sectors.

“Clearly, any step forward by the vendors that supports the end users being able to implement ITIL effectively is welcomed by us,” said Brian Childers, communications and public relations chair, itSMF USA Board of Directors.

“Such standards will go a long way towards making CMDBs and other ITIL-related software tools more effective in helping customers better understand and manage their complex IT environments and should be of significant benefit to all parties involved,” stated Brian Jennings, chairman of itSMF International, in a press release announcing the consortium.

Others, however, are a bit more reserved. Gartner, for example, points to the history of multi-vendor cooperation in the management arena, which Colville and Haight characterize as “just short of abject failure,” as a reason to approach the news with skepticism.

Citing the failure of past efforts—including the International Organization for Standardization’s Open Systems Interconnection model; the Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standard’s Data Center Markup Language; and the Distributed Management Task Force’s Common Information Model—to gain wide-spread vendor adoption.

Add to this list the absence of key management functionality vendors such as Microsoft, and discovery and configuration mapping vendors such as Mercury and Symantec, and Colville and Haight suggest “prudent skepticism as to the likelihood of seeing not only the completion of a standard, but also ultimate market (and vendor) acceptance.”