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.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.