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IBM's Zollar touts new management products

24.05.2006
IBM Wednesday is announcing that the IBM Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) will ship June 30, along with three Process Manager tools. IBM calls the CCMDB a kind of command center for automatic discovery of IT information on servers, applications, storage and network devices and software across an enterprise. Al Zollar, general manager for Tivoli Software at IBM for the past two years, discussed the upcoming releases -- as well as the evolution and importance of management products to customers -- with Computerworld.

What generally is important about these new products? We've been talking about the capabilities of the Change and Configuration Management Database and how they are soon [to be] generally available. The specifics in the announcements are important to the IT management vision, which is about being able to improve the quality, efficiency and service-level attributes of systems, as well as improving labor productivity and automating more functionality in systems.

Let's back up and talk about how these products are being received in the market and their core value. We estimate, through data from IDC, that $30 billion worldwide with be spent on software for infrastructure management in 2008. Meanwhile, the labor required for IT operations will be about $325 billion globally at the same time, which is 10 times the amount spent on management software. So, this is a big area in IT that requires automation. We see the ratio of labor to assets as extreme.

Meaning what? That systems are way too manually operated.

For at least a year, we've heard from IBM and the other major vendors -- CA, Hewlett-Packard Open View and BMC -- that the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and other quality standards groups see the centralized management database as critically important. So what has happened in the past year? The CMDB is an important integration concept. What happened is that many competitors hyped the CMDB. When we looked at this, we saw this as a master data management problem for IT data. But in a major system, the data on the configuration of an infrastructure exists in many repositories, really in maybe hundreds of repositories. So, we've talked about a federated database approach, and I'm pleased the rest of the industry is seeing it that way.

So everybody really agrees on that approach? We are working on sending a specification to a standards organization to allow federation of configuration data. We announced in April that we are working on creating a new interoperability specification designed to enable customers to federate and access information from multivendor IT infrastructures. It is an effort by IBM, BMC, CA, HP, Fujitsu Ltd. and the ITSMF [IT Service Management Forum International], an independent user organization.