VMware's Vendor Profile from the Q4 2010 Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) Radar Report.

The product profiled for this EMA Radar on ADDM is VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager (ADM). This is a suite product that EMA sees as competing with ASG, HP, IBM and other similar vendors not profiled in this report. As the product summary chart shows, VMware vCenter ADM scored strongly on the Vendor Strength and Architecture/Integration axes, with unique advantages as well in terms of Deployment. This is a seasoned product distinguished by the simplicity and efficiency of the core design, and is the only product in this study that is delivered as a virtual appliance. 

The full EMA Radar Report for ADDM report reviews seven providers of ADDM solutions and their products. It compares their ability to deliver application and/or service dependency maps across the heterogeneous hardware and software ecosystems underlying today’s business applications.

ADDM solutions automate the process of mapping transactions and applications to underlying infrastructure and application interdependencies. They leverage a wide variety of discovery and analysis techniques to create service models in a more or less automated fashion (depending on the vendor and product). The level of automation depends on the capabilities of the product and the “secret sauce” analytics delivered by the vendor. While automated service modeling was long considered to be the unattainable “nirvana” that every IT organization was seeking, the intent of this report is to demonstrate that these capabilities now exist and are delivering significant value within a broad range of companies and project initiatives. 

The service models created by these products become invaluable tools supporting virtually every aspect of IT Business Service Management (BSM), data center management, and application support. They also build a strong foundation for IT Service Management (ITSM), supporting the tactical disciplines within Service Support and the more strategic Service Delivery processes. 

In terms of "real world" IT, these products are being used to support Data Center moves and Configuration Management System (CMS) implementations. They also reduce the time required to diagnose application performance and availability problems and the risks involved in Change and Release Management.