IBM Announces Their CMDB

IBM announced that their Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) will be shipped on June 30, 2006 -- along with additional process management tools. The IBM CCMDB is billed as a command center for the automatic discovery of IT information on servers, applications, storage and network devices and software across an enterprise. To hear more about IBM's news read this Q+A with Al Zollar, general manager for Tivoli Software at IBM, conducted by Computerworld.

Why is this interesting? Well, for one, it seems like IBM has a good handle on the actual problem, linking it to master data management. And IBM's system software is typically top notch. But to take it up a few levels, why should anyone truly adopy CMDB? Well, according to a recent article Network World (CMDB adoption: What some numbers tell us and why) the CMDB is at the heart of change and configuration management, service assurance, and problem and incident management initiatives.

These are important initiatives because many organizations do not know what assets they have deployed, so they are over- and under-buying these assets. This, of course, results in inefficiencies -- either too much IT spend or ineffective IT. And the bugaboo of missed SLAs should always be top of mind. And implementing a CCMDB promises to help alleviate these problems. And this is goodness...