IBM, HP, BMC to create new interop spec

Stan Beer
Thursday, 13 April 2006 04:16

IT Industry - Strategy

Leading IT players BMC Software, Fujitsu Limited, HP and IBM have announced plans to create a new interoperability specification designed to enable customers to federate and access information from their complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures. The companies plan to submit a draft specification to an industry standards organization later this year.
Working together, the companies will develop an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other data repositories. As a multi-vendor specification, it will provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications, and middleware.

Today, information about an IT infrastructure, such as which server runs a company’s human resources application and who has access to the application, is scattered across the organization in different formats, making it difficult to access and share. Yet doing so is often critical, especially for organizations grappling with compliance and governance issues.

An industry standard for federating and accessing IT information will integrate communication between CMDBs, which hold details related to the components of an IT infrastructure, including information about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data. An accurate CMDB can help an IT staff understand the relationships and dependencies among these various components. However, with no standard way for different vendors’ CMDBs and other tools to share data, IT information must be collected manually – a time-consuming and costly process.

With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access configuration data, organizations can use their CMDBs to create a more complete and accurate view of IT information spread out across multiple data sources. This makes it easier to keep track of changes to an IT environment, such as when the last time an application was updated, or if there have been changes made to critical configuration information. It also helps organizations better understand the impact of changes they make to the IT environment. A financial services company, for example, could use its federated CMDBs to understand how deploying a new online banking program might impact other parts of the business that share the same resources – even in a multi-vendor environment.

The specification is intended to support the procedures that organizations use to manage their IT operations, such as those described by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a customizable set of best practices.