Bob Quillin, Senior Director Product Marketing, EMC Ionix, discusses Enterprise Management Associates research on CMDB system deployments.

Industry analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) just wrapped up a fascinating study titled: “CMDB System Deployments in 2009: From Philosophy to Federation” in which they focused on the trends and requirements as CMDB systems evolve towards a more federated model. The study surveyed 162 industry executives, managers and professionals and came up with some great news for EMC’s Ionix Service Manager CMDB (formerly Infra) and Ionix Discovery Manager (formerly nLayers) products - plus deep insights into what the true “state of the art” is in federation and discovery.

In their survey, EMA, uncovered a few key insights:

• A majority of respondents recognise the cost savings associated with CMDB deployments and point to these technologies as key to helping companies pull out of the current economic downturn.
• While overall IT spending is declining, investments in CMDB initiatives remained flat in 2009.
• The ability to automate CMDB’s was a primary concern for most respondents, as they ranked automation as the number one feature required when choosing to adopt new solutions.
• For application dependency mapping, the survey reports primary challenges are: “administrative overhead, lack of currency, cost and lack of visibility into how the application dependency mapping tools identifies specific CIs.”

CMDB 2.0: It’s all about Accuracy, Currency and Dependencies

While EMA did not externally publish the actual competitive, head-to-head comparison amongst vendors, they did announce that both EMC’s application dependency mapping and CMDB solutions ranked amongst the highest competitively in terms of customer satisfaction.

It appears we’ve turned the corner in CMDB and CMS deployments - CMDB 2.0 anyone? Where we are now focusing more on the value of the CI’s in the CMDB and their inter-relationships. The majority of CMDB projects I’ve seen have stalled out because: (1) the data in the CMDB was stale the minute it went in and (2) there were little or no dependencies established in the system at all. CMDB projects fail when these two problems are not addressed in the design.

More CM, Less DB

The pairing of the EMC Ionix Service Manager CMDB and EMC Ionix Discovery Manager are a perfect match - yin and yang, hand in glove, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, peanut butter and jelly - well, you get the point. They are already solving problems together for customers - and the survey results indicate how hard this problem is and how EMC is leading the way in solving it.

So, up to now, CMDB deployments have focused exclusively on the DB part - how do I build up the biggest, baddest database? All DB.

In the end, the framing characteristics of CMDB 2.0 comes down to now focusing more on the CM - the “configuration management” part and how dynamic application discovery, dependency mapping, and CMDB federation is becoming the focus as IT organizations move from early experimentation to day-to-day operations.