Vendors Release Management Spec

NEW YORK -- The CMDB Federation (CMDBf) working group today announced it has drafted an industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management systems and service desks. The specification, which the group plans to submit as a standard, is intended to enable organizations to federate and access information from complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures. The CMDBf was founded in April 2006, and today consists of industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu Limited, HP, IBM and Microsoft.

CMDBs give IT organizations complete visibility into the attributes, relationships, and dependencies of the components in their enterprise computing environments. An industry standard for federating and accessing IT information will integrate communication between IT management tools. With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access configuration data, organizations can use their CMDBs to create a more complete and accurate view of IT information spread out across multiple data sources. This makes it easier to keep track of changes to an IT environment, such as the last time an application was updated or changes to critical configuration information. It also helps organizations better understand the impact of changes they make to the IT environment.

The draft specification defines query and registration web services for interaction between a federating CMDB and an MDR, based on HTTP, SOAP, WSDL, XML Schema, and Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) standards.

CMDB Federation