While I am intending this to be just a regular column, trying to give today's topic an adequate headline was tricky given modern tastes for brevity. I do remember, however, that titles were allowed to be more robust in the 17th century and prior - so from that perspective, how's this?: "Some considerations on how IBM's announced definitive acquisition of MRO Software reflects the rising importance of Next Generation Asset Management, and on how NGAM's rise is linked inextricably to the surging interest in CMDB adoption, much like two boats moving forward in parallel might pull each other ahead through a barely visible connecting thread."

Never fear, in spite of the longer title's length, the thoughts here are fairly simple and brief.

First, let's look briefly at IBM's $740 million acquisition of MRO Software. Overall, it's a very smart move by IBM, even if it falls short of being the "end-to-end" asset management story that IBM claims. MRO brings IBM one of the industry's strongest, robust and proven lifecycle asset management solutions, along with some basic service desk and help desk capabilities, including support for such ITIL disciplines as service desk incident and problem management. But MRO's Maximo is primarily strong as a lifecycle asset management system, which evolved from MRO's acquisition of MainControl in 2001.

IBM's acquisition should particularly strengthen its hand in managing software assets from a lifecycle perspective, providing integrated service desk capabilities with existing next-generation features, such as CMDB and discovery. While Maximo has no true chargeback capabilities, IBM's January acquisition of CIMS Labs provides chargeback for virtualized environments with a focus on integrating usage information across systems and database information.

One thing that's not included to any degree yet in IBM's IT asset management offering is full lifecycle support for hardware assets (Maximo has a narrow focus on hardware inventory and discovery) and network-centric asset management. To some degree, this is a "connect-the-dots" challenge for IBM: Maximo includes network devices in its initial inventory and discovery, and Micromuse, which IBM acquired last year, offers some strong foundations for network asset management, particularly in telecommunications or large and complex network environments.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.