BMC’s CTO Tom Bishop responds to Michael Biddick’s Information Week Article and adds to the conversation.
The article also makes an incorrect generalization by suggesting that smaller vendors do a better job of “playing well with others.” BMC – a charter member of the ‘Big Four’ management vendors – provides solutions that operate well in heterogeneous environments and integrate with the broadest range of technologies possible. This allows organizations to utilize current IT investments instead of replacing and beginning anew. As we tell our customers every day, a correct implementation of BMC’s BSM strategy makes our competitor products better. This is a fundamental difference between BMC and our competitors.
One of the biggest challenges I see personally, am asked by clients and integrators constantly, and see a very large amount of traffic headed to my blog from Google searches is around integration difficulties with the BMC Atrium CMDB. I’d like to invite Tom or some of his team to respond and share more about how client’s investments in other vendor technology and products can be improved, simplified or even realized when they desire to leverage the powerful information in the Atrium CMDB, especially complex service relationships and CI information.
I’m aware of the new(ish) Atrium Integration Engine, but I’m pretty sure we (IBM Tivloli) are not exploiting it in any way formally. Can we get a discussion going or information out there in the BMCDN or other place on integrating BMC Atrium with core IBM Tivoli products. Put the bad blood aside, let’s do it for the customers!
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One of those ‘worker bee’ products that Michael Biddick refers to is Tideway Foundation (www.tideway.com). Tideway Foundation also integrates very well with the Atrium CMDB product – an example of where an integration with a BMC product is a success.
In true ‘worker bee’ style, Tideway Foundation searches out every IP facing device on the network, and for distributed systems, collects infrastructure configuration and software details, creating a provable relationship map for everything it finds. This is CI and relationship data about infrastructure and software that can be trusted and fed directly into the Atrium CMDB or other repositories as required.
As is the way with tools, integrating the best products is the most important thing. If ADM is your starting point, focus on the what ADM means to your organisation and focus on the process around maintaining BSM, while the ‘worker bees’ who can integrate with ease complete the manual labour for you.
Thanks for commenting Charles. I’d love for you to share more about Tideway and your technology and products. What is your integration strategies with other vendors? How open, accessible and documented are your APIs, schemas and models for storing discovered CIs, attributes and relationships?
How can my clients (or others) leverage the rich data you discover to enable Business Service Management?
Tks,
Doug