Glad to see this topic being covered, as unplanned change is accounting for most system and network outages. It's actually amazing it has taken so long for industry to popularize and realize that better change control procedures and technologies are needed. More emerging technologies that claim to go beyond the basic capabilities already provided by the big 4 (BMC, HP, IBM, CA) have cropped up, offering things like change blocking and reconcilation (Solidcore) and config assessment(Tripwire). But how long will it take the industry and the big 4 to realize that you need more than just change processes and automation frameworks, and rather get to more aggressive filtering and prevention of the bad changes that are causing these outages. I'm still not seeing HP and BMC address this, even with their big acquisitions of Opsware and BladeLogic. To give them credit, the consolidation has been good for bringing toegther process management and provisioning of change, but I think the next step is getting better control of who and what is changing our precious infrastructures. There is a third leg of the stool missing, and guess what...it's not the CMDB.

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