New EMA Report Examines CMDB and CMS Deployments

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT and data management research and consulting firm, released its newest Radar Report titled, EMA Radar for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: from Database to Federation.

This research is a follow up to EMA Radar for CMDB/CMS Use Cases: Innovation Through Diversity, published in June 2011.

This Radar featured eleven non-platform-centric vendors to show how CMDB/CMS technology is diversifying to address new requirements for dynamic currency and more advanced support for analytics and automation.

This latest research highlights the move towards a federated system anchored more in a service model and application dependency mapping than in the past, as CMDBs evolve towards a Configuration Management System capable of assimilating and optimizing cloud, virtualization and other current technologies.

“Many have erroneously declared that the CMDB is dead or unsuited for new technologies such as cloud,” said Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA. “However this research validates that the CMDB, especially as it evolves towards a federated set of reconciled resources in a CMS, is becoming more critical than ever. This research not only captures and assesses nine leading vendor technologies, it provides deeper insights into how and where CMDBs are being deployed successfully as the technology matures and, in many instances, far transcends the limitations of earlier deployments.”

The importance of the use-case approach is critical in understanding CMDB/CMS positioning. As the prior report states: “No one should invest in a CMDB, or begin a (federated) CMS just to have one. Indeed, the whole notion of a CMDB, and in particular a CMS, is revolutionary exactly because it deconstructs traditional management product assumptions and allows for the reconciliation and effective usage of many different sources of service management information to support virtually all IT processes.”

This Radar targets three critical use cases typical of most CMDB or CMS deployments. These are:

* Asset Management and Financial Optimization

* Change Management and Change Impact Analysis

* Service Impact Management

This Radar Report provides a detailed, comparative study of products from the following nine vendors: ASG Software, Axios Systems, BMC, CA Technologies, HP, IBM, iET Solutions, LANDesk, and ServiceNow.