BMC Software is committed to making significant investments in the common enabling technologies that support its core BSM solutions. The BMC Atrium CMDB is one in a series of deliverables to support this commitment, and is the first to be branded under the BMC Atrium name. BMC Atrium is an open-architected foundation that enables information sharing and centralized management across BMC Software solutions. As the core infrastructure for Business Service Management Routes to Value, BMC Atrium provides a common data repository, shared service model, and unified user and reporting interfaces to accelerate attainment of BSM. By delivering this common set of infrastructure services, BMC Atrium empowers organizations to better control the implementation and ongoing management of their IT solutions.

The BMC Atrium CMDB provides a single, common set of information on the configuration and relationships between items in the IT environment in a manner that can be leveraged by all ITIL processes – creating synergy between different service management functions. Consolidating information within the IT environment is a significant challenge that all organizations face, particularly because most environments are widely dispersed and usually managed by an assembly of applications – often from different vendors. The BMC Atrium CMDB addresses this challenge by enabling customers to fully integrate critical service and infrastructure management applications and break down the traditional functional silos that often exist within an IT organization, all of which improves management of the IT environment. BMC Software’s approach to a CMDB is differentiated from competing solutions in several key areas:

• The BMC Atrium CMDB includes a patent-pending Reconciliation Engine, which enables companies to combine input from multiple data sources and identify and reconcile any differences to establish a true configuration profile.
• It is embedded in or includes out-of-the-box integrations to BMC Software applications, in both infrastructure and service management disciplines, which speeds customers’ migration to true Business Service Management (BSM) and improves overall return on investment.
• BMC Software has provided a number of integration methodologies, including a dedicated set of published APIs that facilitate integrating other enterprise applications to the BMC Atrium CMDB.
• Companies can tailor the processes that leverage the CMDB data via the development environment resident in the Remedy® Action Request System® version 6.3, now packaged with the BMC Atrium CMDB.

Infineon Technologies, a leading designer, builder, and marketer of advanced semiconductor solutions and services, originally deployed BMC Software’s Remedy IT Service Management Suite to consolidate their approach to tracking and managing customer issues, service requests, change requests, and IT assets. According to Robert Molenda, Global Systems Architect at Infineon Technologies, a standardized IT infrastructure is critical to their ongoing business operations. "Managing change in our IT infrastructure is essential to controlling business risk," notes Molenda. "With our Remedy ITSM Suite solution, we’ve had success managing change and standardizing processes in our worldwide IT environment. The BMC Atrium CMDB raises that ability to a new level. This additional level of information sharing provides one complete view of the entire IT infrastructure and improves the manner in which we can share IT configuration information cross all of our IT processes; problem management, change management and asset management."

BMC Atrium CMDB Inspired by ITIL

The BMC Atrium CMDB was conceived with industry standards in mind, including ITIL and those endorsed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Common Information Model (CIM). For example, the out-of-the-box data model supports all primary ITIL Configuration Item (CI) classes and more than 80 potential relationship types that can all be leveraged to better characterize the IT environment. ITIL prescribes that a single, enterprise CMDB is the primary requirement for creating consistency and developing integrations between differing service management processes. This is accomplished by ensuring that each process leverages a single source of information that contains the status, configurations, and relationships between every item in the IT environment.

In its role as a central repository, multiple configurations may exist in the CMDB at any one time to include discovered configurations and target configurations. The BMC Atrium CMDB enables detailed configuration information to continue to reside in its original data source, accessed by the CMDB as required through a patent-pending approach to a federated data store.

"BMC's approach to offering an ITIL-compliant CMDB with open interfaces is great news for the industry and for customers, said Ajei Gopal, Senior Vice President Technology and Corporate Development at Symantec. "With the BMC Atrium CMDB and the broader foundation technology delivered as part of Atrium, Symantec's security management solutions will be able to leverage business priority information to enhance IT security event decision making."

Extensive Incorporation of the BMC Atrium CMDB Advances BSM; Routes to Value
The BMC Atrium CMDB is one of the central elements supporting BMC Software’s Routes to Value. Routes to Value are componentized, ITIL-aligned approaches to deploying Business Service Management (BSM) that make it easier and faster for customers to begin realizing value from their BSM initiative. To support its Routes to Value, as of this release BMC Software has made its BMC Atrium CMDB a component of, or integrated to, eight different specific BMC applications, including:

• The recently-announced BMC IT Discovery suite (Discovery Express, Configuration Discovery, Topology Discovery), which keeps the CMDB continuously updated with actual configuration information on the changing IT environment;
• BMC Service Impact Manager (SIM) Version 5.0, which shipped in December and leverages the CMDB exclusively for the creation and update of Service Models that help prioritize and manage the IT responses relative to the business impact; and
• Remedy IT Service Management Suite Version 6.0, shipping today, which includes the service management applications for Help Desk, Change Management, Asset Management and Service Level Agreements, utilizes CMDB configuration information to speed problem resolution, plan changes, and create more detailed asset histories and audit trails.

According to a recent Forrester report, the implementation of a configuration management database CMDB is at the core of configuration management. A CMDB stores details of the elements that an organization uses to provide and manage its IT services. This is an emerging market — not in terms of needs, but in terms of technology. Using a CMDB to capture critical information on the components and relationships that exist within an IT environment has several advantages: evaluating the impact of a projected change of a component on an application or a service in advance; visualizing the consistency and compatibility of software and/or hardware versions and quickly rectifying anomalies; automatically discovering undocumented changes and evaluating their impact on many infrastructure problems, including security; and constructing an audit trail of changes to the infrastructure to establish compliance with various regulations¹.

"Customers are expressing an escalating need for a genuine, open enterprise CMDB, as it’s becoming increasingly essential to their ability to deploy complete solutions for managing change and risk in their IT environment," said Rone Reed, Vice President of Consulting and Systems Integration of CompuCom, formerly GE ITS, a leading provider of services to customers seeking to implement change and configuration management processes. “Clearly, the BMC Atrium CMDB has been built to fill that role, providing open access to any application, robust reconciliation capabilities, and a large number of important out-of-the-box integrations.”

The BMC Atrium CMDB is available immediately, and currently ships as part of all the principle applications that comprise BMC Software’s Remedy IT Service Management 6.0 suite as well as BMC's Service Impact Manager 5.0. BMC also offers a number of additional applications that have been integrated to the CMDB. In the coming months, BMC will offer other products that leverage the CMDB, including partner integrations.