ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
April 2009 EMA Analyst’s Corner:
From the CMDB to the CMS: Accelerating the Time to Value through Federation
CMDB System (CMDBS) deployments have been evolving significantly over the last few years towards higher levels of federation, growing CI scope, and more defined paths to value. At the same time, the frustration level with assimilating CMDB-related technologies has risen over the last two years and some hard lessons have been learned. Chief among them is to start with a well planned and well-defined first phase that can deliver value quickly.
But there are other lessons to be learned, of course. Several of these lessons were underscored in research done in February and March of this year, including 162 respondents for quantitative research and fifteen focal interviews. Overall, the results were encouraging and tend to support the idea that IT executives recognize the cost-saving values of CMDB deployments as creative approaches to working more effectively, instead of being scared away by the transformative nature of CMDBS initiatives. In other words, CMDB Systems are part of the cure to the economic downturn rather than being one of its casualties, or worse, part of the problem.
For instance, while IT decreasing IT budgets outpaced increasing IT budgets at a 2.5 to 1 ratio, budgets for CMDB-related initiatives were much less impacted. CMDB-related spending showed only an eight percent difference between decreasing and increasing budgets, with 42% staying the same – or in other words – relatively flat. This is a clear sign that more and more IT organizations are grasping the fact that CMDB investments represent a creative approach to gaining operational efficiencies, minimizing risk, and optimizing capex assets through automated insights into duplicative, unused, or inappropriately licensed assets.
One of the more significant trends in 2009 would appear to be the rise of new groups – predominantly called “Service Management” – as a clear and close second to IT Operations, which has dominated CMDB “ownership” ever since 2005. “Service Management” garnered a full 25% of respondent votes compared to only 13% in Q2 2008.This is quite a rise for a nine month difference! I view this as a sign of maturity, since Service Management significantly outpaced IT Operations in phase of deployment, multi-brand federation, and quantified benefits from CMDB System deployments.
Another interesting analysis shows that larger CMS deployments actually favor getting more IT investments. In the categories of 10,000 - 99,999 CIs and 100,000 CIs or more, respondents indicated that their CMDB dollars for 2009 are increasing, while those with fewer CIs show a decrease. In other words, larger, more evolved CMDBS deployments are crossing that critical line in the sand towards showing value and convincing executives that further investments are key.
In terms of hard value, while 39% of respondents claimed a proactive cost benefits of only $50,000 or less, 37% achieved cost efficiencies in excess of $250,000 over a twelve-month period. When correlated with company size, time in deployment, phases in deployment and other criteria, the number one impacting factor in achieving high dollar benefits was the level of executive involvement. This underscores the political and cultural roots of CMDBS initiatives, versus viewing them as primarily software deployments.
When asked about support for multi-brand investments versus a single broad portfolio, respondents favored “a CMDB choice that most effectively reconciles and assimilates key existing and planned investments in management tools, including multi-brand solutions” over a vendor with the greatest single portfolio breadth by a margin of more than two to one. This is in keeping with the core driver behind CMDB deployments, which is fundamentally the need to integrate and reconcile existing investments rather than rip and replace existing management software with a new framework design. It also fundamentally underscores the need to approach the CMDB not just as a Configuration Management Data Base, but as a set of federated resources with defined trusted sources – with much of it depending on normalization, reconciliation and data access, and only select data being replicated to a core system.
The move towards federation is far from a purely “ideological” one – in support of ITILv3 versus v2. To some degree, in fact, ITIL was actually catching up with real-world requirements and practices being established well before the spring of 2007, as IT adopters increasingly realized that the endgame for CMDBs wasn’t simply to update a single, massive repository. Instead, CI attribute information – ranging from asset to performance information – was lodged natively in other federated sources, most of which would not be replicated in a core system but linked to it by a cohesive data model and normalized means for identifying CIs and CI attributes.
It is both significant and validating, then, that only 14% of respondents in Q1 2009 state that “they are not yet concerned about federation – and almost all of these were in early stage deployments.
Learn more about the complete research reports from this study:
- For enterprise IT – Making Your CMDB System Deployment Count: Who is Winning the Battle to Show Value and Why?
- For IT management vendors – CMDB System Deployments in 2009: From Philosophy to Federation
