The jury's in on the CMDB - or is it?

CMDB adoption in the real world

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

The numbers are in on configuration management database adoption and they're soon to be available in EMA's report "CMDB adoption in the real world: Just how real is it?" When I first embarked on the research, I wrote a column about the project and suggested that in my view, the CMDB had a life of its own, beyond that of its "creator," the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. And the numbers are back to prove me right, or wrong.

ITIL is, as most of you know by now, a resource for IT organizations seeking to define and evolve their processes from a best practice perspective in support of what ITIL calls IT Service Management or ITSM. ITIL provides libraries that can help IT organizations collaborate more efficiently across silos, address customer requirements more effectively, align more closely with the businesses that IT supports, and proactively take control of change.

Just as ITIL is itself a resource for IT organizations - ITIL posits a CMDB as a resource that's critical for enabling best practices for not only configuration management, but also a wide range of other disciplines and processes. At core, the CMDB is a trusted and dynamic repository of information relevant to such things as infrastructure configuration and topology as they map to the delivery of IT services. ITIL also extends the CMDB to include "the relationships between all systems components including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases..." as well as "corporate data about employees, suppliers, locations and business units." ITIL suggests that the CMDB "is likely to be based upon database technology that provides flexible and powerful interrogation facilities."

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The numbers are in on configuration management database adoption and they're soon to be available in EMA's report "CMDB adoption in the real world: Just how real is it?" When I first embarked on the research, I wrote a column about the project and suggested that in my view, the CMDB had a life of its own, beyond that of its "creator," the IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. And the numbers are back to prove me right, or wrong.

ITIL is, as most of you know by now, a resource for IT organizations seeking to define and evolve their processes from a best practice perspective in support of what ITIL calls IT Service Management or ITSM. ITIL provides libraries that can help IT organizations collaborate more efficiently across silos, address customer requirements more effectively, align more closely with the businesses that IT supports, and proactively take control of change.

Just as ITIL is itself a resource for IT organizations - ITIL posits a CMDB as a resource that's critical for enabling best practices for not only configuration management, but also a wide range of other disciplines and processes. At core, the CMDB is a trusted and dynamic repository of information relevant to such things as infrastructure configuration and topology as they map to the delivery of IT services. ITIL also extends the CMDB to include "the relationships between all systems components including incidents, problems, known errors, changes and releases..." as well as "corporate data about employees, suppliers, locations and business units." ITIL suggests that the CMDB "is likely to be based upon database technology that provides flexible and powerful interrogation facilities."

In parallel, EMA has been tracking an architectural evolution within the IT management marketplace - a phenomenon all in itself quite apart from ITIL. This evolution has to do with a shift away from siloed design points towards architecture that favors more modular building blocks. The still largely unspoken goal of this architectural evolution is to enable management applications to share data more efficiently, streamlining data collection and enabling more effective analytics in support of faster and more accurate diagnostics, configuration management, service-level management, etc.

Architecturally, this evolutionary trend moves towards what I would call the CD and CD player model, in which next generation platforms become enablers for intelligent integration across multiple brands. From an IT adopter perspective, this would be the best of all possible worlds, while forcing vendors to own up to "ecosystem" vs. "isolated" requirements in how they model and position their products. In other words, vendors would have to design their management tools to work together vs. simply compete in imperialistic fashion for real or imagined turf.

In its next-generation architecture analysis from the second quarter of 2004, EMA predicted: "federated data stores in support of cooperative analytic engines." At that time, EMA viewed this as a future trend, one that would unfold over the course of 10-20 years. This was before the public visibility of the CMDB became a marquis affair - virtually within the last 18 months. As this began to occur, EMA couldn't help but notice the linkages between the two visions - architecture and process - and saw what we felt might just be "the perfect storm."

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.