At the BMC® Remedy® User Group 2005, BMC Software® continued to deliver advancements in its Change and Configuration Management (CCM) solutions to enable customers that manage IT to respond quickly and effectively to rapid change in their business environment. Today, BMC Software introduced new integrations for its discovery solutions that expedite reconciliation and reporting and extended the ecosystem of the BMC® Atrium™ Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with a developers network and new partner integrations.
Launched last summer, the comprehensive BMC Software CCM solutions enable companies to more quickly and easily identify the IT environment related to critical business services, respond to changing business and IT requirements, and control all business critical configurations in the IT environment. The CCM solutions support the BMC Software Business Service Management (BSM) strategy through automated IT discovery solutions that identify all components of the IT environment, their relationships to each other, and the critical business services they support.
“BMC Software’s leadership in change and configuration management through delivering innovative solutions such as the BMC Atrium CMDB has allowed the company to set a new standard in IT and business alignment,” said Tom Bishop, chief technology officer at BMC Software and keynote speaker at RUG. “By strengthening the discovery solutions that feed it, as well as building out the partners who both populate and access data from it, BMC Software is creating an ecosystem around the BMC Atrium CMDB that will make it even more valuable in enabling companies to understand and manage their IT environments from a business perspective.”
New Partner Integrations and Developers Network Extend BMC Atrium CMDB Ecosystem
BMC Atrium CMDB, a purpose-built, ITIL inspired CMDB, addresses the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) requirement for a single, enterprise CMDB to ensure data consistency and simplify integration between differing service management processes. Currently shipping with BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM), and other service management applications, the BMC Atrium CMDB provides service modeling and a graphical viewer that is attractive to partners looking to offer business context in their management solutions. To make it easier for partners to leverage the power of BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Software is introducing the MarketZone Developers Network at RUG. The MarketZone Developers Network offers schema, best practices, and an API for anyone who wants to build integrations to BMC Atrium CMDB.
BMC Software recently completed its first sessions of BMC Atrium CMDB developer’s integration training. Among the companies participating were two CCM partners, Tripwire and Voyence. At RUG, both companies will showcase their solutions and the value of integrating with BMC Atrium CMDB.
Tripwire, the world leader in change auditing solutions, is leveraging BMC Atrium CMDB to enable customers to better understand network service issues. Tripwire Enterprise detects changes made to servers and network devices, reconciles authorized and intended changes, and reports on unexpected change activity to maintain infrastructure integrity and enforce change management processes. At RUG, Tripwire is providing a business service context to change management with demonstrations of Tripwire Enterprise mapping its change information with the BMC Atrium CMDB configuration data to enable assessment of business service impacts within BMC SIM and automated closed-loop change management with other BMC change and configuration management products.
By working with Voyence, the leading provider of network configuration management solutions, BMC Software is expanding its view into network configuration, offering customers the ability to control changes to network devices. Voyence’s VoyenceControl! automates network planning, design, deployment, and change management processes. At RUG, Voyence is demonstrating integration between VoyenceControl! and BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM), and BMC Remedy Help Desk. This integration supports the BMC Software BSM strategy by providing companies with expanded visibility into their IT infrastructure and enables them to understand how changes to the configuration of the network affect business services.
New Discovery Capabilities Enable Rapid Response to Change
Last December, BMC shipped its IT Discovery suite, which identifies all aspects of the business-critical IT environment and keeps the BMC Atrium CMDB continuously updated with actual configuration information on the changing IT environment. The suite includes BMC Discovery Express, which enables customers to identify what components make up their IT environment; BMC Configuration Discovery, which defines how those assets are configured; and BMC Topology Discovery, which shows how systems are connected and applications are related. To meet today’s dynamic business environment, discovery needs to be done often to be sure that the most current information is available. To address these needs, BMC Software is delivering new reconciliation and reporting capabilities for BMC Discovery Express and BMC Configuration Discovery that help companies become more efficient at validating planned changes and discovering unplanned, or rogue, changes.
BMC Discovery Express and BMC Configuration Discovery have added several new reconciliation rules that are available out of the box. New integration between these discovery solutions also optimizes the reconciliation process by handling it at the Discovery product level, before the information is incorporated into BMC Atrium CMDB. By moving the reconciliation out to the discovery solutions, BMC Software simplifies reconciliation and expedites processing, making it possible to have near real-time information on the state of an organization’s IT environment. BMC Software also has added a new common reporting interface for both products, based on Marimba Report Center. The new interface is Web-based, offers more than 200 reports out-of-the-box, as well as three powerful tools for manipulating the discovery data, to make it easier for companies to understand their IT environment.
