Category — BMC Software

There’s apparently a new EMA report available (anyone have accesss?) that talks to the SLM & BSM Market Forecast through 2012. Not sure how they come to their conclusions, but here’s some of the findings from the PR and my highlighting of interesting points.

According to the research, SLM and BSM revenues continue to grow at an astounding rate for some solution providers. The IT user community now is grasping the difference between SLM and BSM, and how to apply both technologies within the enterprise. As such, the report includes separate forecasts for both SLM and BSM. In March 2006, EMA published a market-sizing report that combined SLM and BSM offerings into a single category, with a total market size of nearly $1.4 billion. In the 2008 findings, EMA expects the SLM market to grow by at least 30 percent during the coming year, with BSM solutions growing by as much as 50 percent.

Other key findings from this research include: — BMC Software, CA, HP and IBM continue to lead the charge in both SLM and BSM. — Digital Fuel, Oblicore and Managed Objects have all demonstrated staying power and delivered innovative SLM/BSM functionality with a top-down, business perspective. — BSM enables IT to manage directly to business objectives and provides executives with visibility into IT’s value to the business. SLM supports this value by measuring individual technology silos to committed quality levels. — Many enterprises view best-practice frameworks as critical to operations, and ITIL clearly leads the pack for SLM and BSM. — The SLM and BSM market has experienced significant consolidation since the firm’s 2006 market-sizing report, resulting in more robust solutions for enterprise IT.

These may be useful resources for my readers:

EMA research director Erickson-Harris will share highlights from this new research study during a free Webinar titled “SLM/BSM Market Sizing 2007 Research” to be held on Thurs., Jan. 17, 2008 at 2 p.m. EST. To sign-up for the Webinar, visit: http://www.emausa.com/ema_lead.php?ls=slmbsmwebws0108&;bs=slmbsmweb0108

In addition, EMA offers a free online SLM and BSM Solutions Center where IT professionals can research and compare unbiased analyst profiles of dozens of leading SLM and BSM solutions. Register for free access at: http://itsolutions.slm.emausa.com/ This is TERRIBLY OUT OF DATE for the IBM Tivoli BSM Offering!

It’s finally here. As Van Wiles (BMC) says “The CMDBf Cone of Silence is Lifted”. William Vambenepe (HP) announces it here and the CMDBf website has the spec and files here.

William also provides some practical insight into the specification’s application in a posting called “Tutorial and pseudo-algorithm for CMDBF Query operation”.

I expect that we’ll see some more commentary over the next couple weeks on the positive and negative sides of this. Should be interesting to follow.

Van Wiles reports that CMDBf members were able to do some sort of data import/export.

“Effectively all participants were able to connect to each other’s web services and pull (or push) meaningful data to the other participants’ web services using a defined set of interfaces.”

My bet is they exercised a “shim” API or wrapper in front of the BMC Atrium CMDB and IBM Tivoli CCMDB to do simple imports/exports of some high level data. The real meat and potatoes will be how well the data models line up between each vendor and just what can be mapped, exported/imported between CMDB’s and what can not.

What we need is a full vendor common data model mashup so we can easily see what everyone’s doing, what they each call “things” and where the gaps are. Are vendors publishing their data models? It’d be a good project for some Web2.0 systems management or ITIL practitioner to throw together something like this. Then this could be extended to include the types of information about “things” in all of the network, system, application and service management and monitoring tools out there. So Billy the practitioner wants to know everything about this really important business service or application, the mashup maker would allow them to see their “federated CMDB” information all the way out to their management and monitoring tools, historical monitoring information, events, outages, perf/avail/capacity information, etc. One “federated” service oriented view that cuts through all of the IT silos to enable someone to make the right decisions at the right time.

Add some comments here if you find links to these.

• IBM Tivoli CCMDB Common Data Model
• BMC Atrium Common Data Model
• HP Common Data Model
• CA Common Data Model
• Fujitsu Common Data Model
• Microsoft Common Data Model

Interesting opinons on the Business Service Management (BSM) market from Forrester.

BMC has made the report available here.

Just found the CMDB Federation white paper today. This is the much anticipated first deliverable from the joint working group made up of IBM, BMC, HP, Microsoft, Fujitsu and CA. You can download it here or here.

Update - Looks like they have the beginnings of a website now here.

Update - IT Skeptic’s Post here.

Hank Marquis has some good commentary here.

Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group (ANSMTUG)
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February Meeting Announcement
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This month’s meeting will be a little different than some of the past meetings. Are you hearing about ITIL but haven’t had time to look into it? Just need some information to get started? This month’s meeting is for you. BMC Software’s Scott Watson, a certified ITIL Service Manager, will be on hand to present an “ITIL Primer”. The presentation will provide an overview of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) as well as some thoughts as to why you should care about ITIL. As usual, the presentation will focus on the topic and not sales.

Please help us out by RSVPing (see link below) by Tuesday, February 20th, if you intend to attend so we can have a headcount for the food
and drink.

What is the ANSMTUG all about?
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The Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group was created to foster collaboration between administrators, architects, engineers, and operators of applications and tools used to manage and monitor networks, systems, applications, services, and business activities.

There are numerous enterprise and service provider companies in the Atlanta area who use best of breed applications and tools from companies such as IBM Tivoli/Micromuse, OpenService, Quest Software (Foglight), Hewlett-Packard, EMC/SMARTS, BMC Software, CA, Concord Communications, InfoVista, etc. The intent of the group is not to be completely aligned with any particular vendor or solution, but rather focus on network and systems management applications and tools in general. There will likely be more focus on a select handful of vendor solutions than others, but this will be driven by the users and not the vendors.

Meeting Details
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Cost: Free!
Date: Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
Time: 7:00PM to 9:00(ish) PM
Location: IBM, 4111 Northside Parkway (near I-75 and the Mt Paran Road exit on the northwest side of town)

Parking: Free.

Refreshments: Food and drinks provided by BMC Software.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 to rsvp@ansmtug.org

I will try and get some time on the calendar with some of the internal IBMers working on this effort and put another interview out there. I found out about this via a BMC Blog posting by Van Wiles here.

Interesting commentary will likely appear in the trade rags and skeptic blogs alike very soon.

-snip-

CMDB Federation Consortium completes white paper describing the CMDB Federation specification.

Well, we did it!

The CMDBF Consortium has completed its first objective, which is a white paper describing the proposed approach to federating multiple “Management Data Repositories” into a “Federated CMDB.”

Just released here.

All tied up into the BSM, CMDB and IT process messaging.

Question - Does BMC have a pure-play BSM solution or are they about the sum of all the parts?