CA Seeks to Ensure CMDB Success with Open, Industry-Supported Standard
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NEW YORK, NY UNITED STATES
Standards Body Approves Specification for Federating and Accessing Multi-Vendor IT Management Data
ISLANDIA, N.Y., July 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CA, Inc. (Nasdaq: CA) today announced its participation in a newly approved industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) and other management data repositories (MDRs), including asset management systems and service desks. CA contributed to the open standard, which aims to enable organizations to federate information from complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures. The specification was approved by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF).
Robust CMDBf standard-based federation of configuration data is a key to high-value change and configuration management that reduces risks and proactively prevents incidents and problems at the service desk. Federated CMDB data speeds and improves the accuracy of impact and root-cause analysis at the service desk and reduces the cost and uncertainty of deployments, fostering better Lean IT decisions that increase service availability and decrease resource consumption.
"Every day, our customers ask CA for help implementing CMDBs that federate asset and configuration data from both CA and non-CA systems. Without extensive federation, configuration management is complicated and enterprises are forced to restrict the scope of their CMDB projects and limit the realization of their potential value," said Brian Bell, senior vice president and general manager, CA Service Management. "We knew a vendor-neutral, service-oriented standard like the CMDBf would help CA support a wide cross-functional view of IT services while maintaining the lean and robust configuration management practices that our customers ask for. Consequently, we invested expertise and time into writing the CMDBf specification. CA is committed to leading the industry in adopting and supporting these standards in all our products."
In 2008, CA implemented and released the CA CMDB product with services specified in the first public release of the specification by the CMDBf consortium. In September 2008, CA participated in the first public demonstration of the CMDBf specification at itSMF Fusion. The interoperability demonstration revealed a better way to consolidate IT data in a multi-vendor environment by linking CA data sources for a single view of their IT systems and components. CA showed businesses that they can successfully link data sources and asset information in a multi-vendor environment to streamline IT service management initiatives.
"We are seeing the role of the CMDBf standard becoming more important for diverse vendors looking to realize the benefits of federated systems in their customer deployments," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. "The ability to implement data from across a multi-vendor, heterogeneous environment will provide IT organizations with the necessary insight to effectively manage the largest and most complex computing environments. On the other hand, the very promise of a Configuration Management System will become muted, or even hollow, without the growing adoption and evolution of a standard like the CMDBf."
CA announced plans to support the CMDBf specification in November 2008 with the release of CA CMDB r12. Available as a standalone product or included with CA Service Desk Manager r12, CA CMDB r12 features federation capabilities to provide a comprehensive view of how IT components and relationships are configured including hardware, software and physical and virtual servers across mainframe and distributed environments. More information is available at: http://www.ca.com/us/cmdb.aspx
CA (Nasdaq: CA), the world's leading independent IT management software company, helps customers optimize IT for better business results. CA's Enterprise IT Management solutions for mainframe and distributed computing enable Lean IT -- empowering organizations to more effectively govern, manage and secure their IT operations. For more information, visit www.ca.com.
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