Jean-Christophe Martin's blog - cmdb tag

CA acquired Cendura in September

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:16:27 GMT

Last month, CA acquired Cendura to complement its CMDB offering. This comes after a string of consolidations
in the discovery space (see my previous post about Applications and Asset discovery landscape).
It will be interesting to watch how CA integrates Cendura's Cohesion with its own Sonar technology :

Sonar watches and analyzes traffic on the network, and understands more than 1,700 protocols and information sources. It builds accurate maps and keeps those maps updated as resource allocations change.

Also, Cohesion is coming with an impressive set of rules that could be applied to ensure the compliance of configurations
with best practices. Integrating these rules on top of a CMDB could provide an interesting way of performing
configuration management (configuration audit) or even problem management (root cause analysis).
CA is expecting to integrate Cendura's technology within 120 days. Lets see.

Technorati Tags: CMDB, ITIL

CMDB Reconciliation

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:20:33 GMT

In a post titled "Reconciliation: The Key to an Accurate CMDB" the author suggest that discovery and mapping tools are key to ensure the accuracy of a CMDB. However, this solves only one of the problems: how to ensure that the infrastructure state matches what is in the CMDB. The issue is that there is no way to know if what is discovered ought to be or is simply the result of out of band management.
The key to solve this issue is to drive the configuration and changes through the CMDB, by integrating the CMDB with change management, release management or configuration tools.

Application and Asset discovery landscape

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 23:31:51 GMT

With the recent acquisition of nLayers by EMC, it is the right time to look back at the landscape after this wave of consolidation :

EMC acquired nLayers, and their Insight product
Symantec acquired Relicore and their Clarity product
Eracent has its EnterpriseAM product
BMC has BMC Foundation Discovery with technology coming from Network Associates' Magic, and Marimba
Tideway with its Foundation product
IBM acquired Collation and its Confignia product
Mercury acquired Appilog
Cendura has Cohesion
CA with its Sonar product
HP with its acquisition of Peregrine

There are still some independent companies, and options for consolidation.