BMC Finds Sanctuary in Atrium CMDB

When you make one of your most successful products better, you’ll want to let the world know.

BMC Software said it plans to unveil the second generation of its Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB), a cornerstone of the software maker’s business service management strategy.

A CMDB is a database that houses relevant information about the pieces of the information system used in a company’s IT services stack, including software, hardware and staff.

Good CMDBs organize the data and provide a way of examining that data, an important function at a time when compliance regulations call for companies to render data cleanly and accurately.

BMC CTO Tom Bishop said Atrium CMDB unifies the sharing of data across all parts of an IT infrastructure. With the aid of BMC’s Automated Discovery, Atrium can model all IT elements.

Version 2.0 is a step up from version 1.0 in the sense that it federates, or links together, disparate views of the IT infrastructure. It then unifies the different IT vantage points for viewing through one window.

With Atrium 2.0, Bishop said customers are now able to access a new CMDB management console, a configuration item graphical relationship viewer and browser, and new status accounting and tracking capabilities. Additional utilities in version 2.0 of Atrium CMDB include a software library and software dictionary.

Bishop noted that having a thorough map of a company’s service elements can foster proactive impact analysis to pinpoint risks, and accelerates the resolution of service glitches or failures.

BMC competes with IBM, CA, HP and Mercury Interactive in the multi-million-dollar CMDB market.

While these vendors compete, they also cooperate on some fronts for what they say is the betterment of the industry.

Last month, BMC, Fujitsu Limited, HP, CA and IBM vowed to create a new interoperability specification designed to enable customers to link information from their multi-vendor IT infrastructures.

They plan to develop an open specification for sharing information between CMDBs and other data repositories. The goal is to provide companies with greater flexibility for adding new hardware, applications and middleware.