BMC's new CTO touts virtues of BSM

BMC's new CTO, Tom Bishop--who previously held the same post at Tivoli Software-- recently spoke with Computerworld about the jump.  Bishop is banking on the increasing importance of Business Service Management (BSM) and believes that BMC’s experience and approach is the right one. "IT needs to be managed as a business system, and we've known that for 10 years. Very few businesses wouldn't be in real trouble if IT went down for a few days”, he said. 

At the heart of a BSM solution is the Configuration Management Database (CMBD), which provides a single view of configurable IT assets such as servers, desktops, routers, etc., and their relationships to each other across IT processes. Bishop highlighted the importance of it:

"The Information Technology Infrastructure Library [ITIL] recognized this database was a core requirement, and it has taken various groups a while to catch up. You can't do Business Service Management without a systems view. CMDB is like a data warehouse insofar as it can be viewed as a way to get disparate data from disparate management tools."

In the Q&A, Bishop took some cracks at IBM's approach, calling it "slideware." He said, "When IBM says it has the truly federated CMDB, they don't understand what BMC has. They are trying to point to differences when none exist."

Nonetheless, IBM, like other competitors, is making progress. Big Blue recently announced new IT service management software that automates the integration of IT processes across an organization.  IBM mashed CMBD and Change Management into one, calling it IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB). Working with partners Cendura, Collation, nLayers and Relicore to collect change information, the "virtualized" database federates IT information spread across multiple databases. 

Watch this space to keep heating up in coming months.