PRODUCT BRIEF | � ©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Seamless Technologies Steps up to the Challenge of Automated Population for CMDB Systems

AbstractWhile interest and activity in Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Systems, and the broader notion of a feder-ated Configuration Management System (CMS), has continued to grow, many deployments are still stumbling with a number of foundational hurdles. These typically divide between political and organizational hurdles, such as lack of sufficient executive-level support, expectation setting across stakeholders, and poor communication across IT– and more technically specific chal-lenges. Effective automation for normalizing information from multiple management data repositories (MDRs) into a CMDB/CMS remains one of the very top technical challenges in cur-rent deployments – as has become conspicuous both through extensive EMA research and focused consulting engagements. This report examines Seamless Technologies’ uniquely suc-cessful and pragmatic approach to this technical challenge in broader industry context.

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Other (Please specify)

Disaster Recovery–related savings

Faster time to provision new application services (productivity and or revenue benefits)

Reduced SLA penalties

Shortened MTTR through improved diagnostics

More efficient compliance audits

Shortened MTTR by identifying the right person to fix a problem (CI owner)

Shortened MTTR by improving change management effectiveness

Reduced asset costs by identifying redundant HW assets

Reduced asset costs through improved SW license management

Reduced downtime for key applications

Improved operational efficiencies (reduced operational overhead)

Which areas has your company seen monetary/business advantages from your CMDB System deployment? Select all.

Figure 1: Operational downtime, reduced downtime, and reduced asset costs lead in areas where CMDB/CMS adopters have enjoyed financial benefits from their investments

IssuesIn spite of troubled economic times, and in some more enlightened organizations in part because of them, CMDB/CMS deployments continue to garner critical attention among IT executives, architects, and planners. This is partly because CMDBs are designed to bring a cohesive foundation to support a wide range of processes and IT tasks, ranging from problem solving, to governance, to change management, to long-term planning and optimization. Figure 1 taken from 2009 EMA research: CMDB System Deployments

HIGHLIGHTSVendor name: Seamless Technologies Inc

Product name: CMDB/CMS Connectors

Production function: Best practice mapping and reconciliation of CIs, attributes and relationships in CMDB population

Operating systems: Windows, Linux, Unix

Vendor contact: sales@seamlessti.com

Pricing information: please contact salesspt@seamlessti.com

PRODUCT BRIEF | � ©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

in 2009, from Philosophy to Federation – presents a sizeable list of advantages achieved by respondents, many of whom had benefited in large part through planning, dialog and appropriate preparation even prior to software deployments. This research report targeted 182 primarily mid-tier and large enterprise respondents in North America, most of who worked with companies that had global footprints, and all of whom had at least committed plans underway for CMDB/CMS deployment.

Still, the progress made in CMDB/CMS deployments remains an area for improvement. Here are a few relevant data points taken from this same research:

54% of CMDB deployments in the first half of 2009 had been ongoing for more than one year

A typical Full-Time-Employee (FTE) count is 2.3 professionals (including parts of part-time professionals). Needless to say, the number is higher in larger companies than in smaller ones

36% of deployments have or have planned between 10,000 and 99,999 CIs and 4% have more than a million

70% prefer a solution that allows them to populate their CMDB/CMS from multiple vendor (brand) sources versus a single brand that attempts to do this from within its own portfolio

54% have targeted levels of accuracy for CI and CI attribute information at 95% or higher, while only 10% fall below targets of 75% accuracy

61% recognize that all CI updates needn’t occur at the same time – that different CIs may require different levels of currency. This includes 16% currently seeking real-time currency, and 43% claiming some level of automation for updating their CIs. Actual dialog, however, reveals that many in this category have deployed solutions for automation, but failed to fully automate the population of targeted CIs into the CMDB

And in fact, as shown in Figure 2, lack of automation in establishing and maintaining CMDBs is clearly the biggest issue when it comes to CMDB/CMS-related maintenance

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Frequency of patches to core CMDB software

Other (Please specify)

Version upgrades affecting integration between CMDB System components Incompatibility of CMDB customizations

Timeliness of data (update intervals)

Lack of automation in establishing and maintaining CMDB data

What is the top maintenance concern for your CMDB system?

Figure 2: Lack of automation clearly dominates concerns for CMDB currency and maintenance

Research also showed that reconciled discovery and application dependency mapping – or the automated association of applications with infrastructure – is still very much a black art. While dominant concerns among adopters were administrative overhead, currency of information, and cost – out of fourteen actual deployments examined, none had achieved a fully automated capability for enabling automated population of their CMDB directly through their application dependency mapping tools. More specifically, six had no application dependency mapping investments, and the rest were in very preliminary evaluations.

The following comments are telling:

“Right now we are looking at leveraging existing in-house technology for mining application-to-infrastruc-ture interdependencies. We have developed a script to search for resident applications. We did bring in solutions from several platforms to evaluate application dependency mapping, but we thought the cost was

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PRODUCT BRIEF | � ©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

too high – one quote was $1,600 per server. Our idea is that keeping current on this will require ‘ongoing guerilla warfare,’ although we’re optimistic that fine-tuning the application landing process should deal with most of it.” (U.S.-based global petrochemical company)

“To be honest, most CMS-related technologies still have plenty of room for improvement. You can spend oodles of money only to find that everything falls down in implementation. I think that many vendors don’t really fully understand yet what’s needed from them in terms of software and support to make these initia-tives work.” (Large U.S.-based systems integrator and IT services provider)

Seamless TechnologiesSeamless Technologies, Inc. has a long history of working with CMDB System deployments both as a systems integrator and consulting services provider, and as a software solution provider. Its approach to automating CMDB population has evolved out of pragmatism in meeting well-defined customer challenges in real-world situations. Seamless Technologies’ customer base is impressive, with more than two hundred customers in seventeen countries, and 30% of the Global & US Fortune 100 for its customers.

Seamless Technologies is a leading supplier of solutions to increase service quality and reduce the cost associated with managing complex large-scale IT organizations. Both through its BSM accelerators “con-nectors,” and through its services, Seamless can claim more than one billion objects reconciled into BMC Atrium CMDB to date.

The Seamless ApproachSeamless Technologies has developed a series of BSM accelerators as connectors targeted at helping to automate integration requirements at different levels of integration. These include event-based, data-based service impact connectors, as well as workflow/trouble ticket integration for ITIL service support auto-mation. But the focus here is on the data-level integration achieved through Seamless’ CMDB Connectors. Seamless introduced these connectors three years ago, and has seen steady growth ever since.

According to Seamless, these connectors are demonstrably faster than other approaches for BMC Atrium CMDB population from a variety of HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Blackberry, IBM TADDM, VMware, NetApp and other sources. Seamless plans to expand its Data Connectors as part of an overall strategy to create a next genera-tion Cloud Aware real-time ITIL integration solution

The connectors are designed to accelerate existing deployments and reduce time to value, and to insulate IT adopters (who may be familiar with Atrium and Remedy, but who are not familiar with detailed data formats from other sources) from having to become de facto “domain experts” in knowing what to do with data fields in order to map to their specific priorities for CMDB population. According to Kevin Johnson, President of Seamless Technologies, “New customers of our data integration platform have CMDB data models in hours as opposed to the current 2-6 months – we shift the focus from ‘how do I map, load and maintain the CMDB’ to what’s the business use of ‘end-to-end CMDB/CMS configuration automation data and Business Service Management based on automatically maintained live data.’ Customers want premapped, customizable, CMDB data models of the operational environment – our approach to dependency mapping is different in that we build relationship maps in the CMDB based on the customer’s existing investments in tools, people and processes such as VMware Vcenter, CiscoWorks, Microsoft SCCM or custom data sources, which can be complementary to dynamic discovery tools, or standalone, depending on the customers maturity and needs” Using this approach, Seamless ships pre-defined policies and templates optimized to support defined phase objectives for CMDB deployments, versus more laborious manual generic data gathering.

The benefits delivered from the suite of Seamless CMDB Connectors can include:

Shorter time to value and lower cost. Seamless claims that its connectors deliver effective data integration between the CMDB and federated MDRs in hours and weeks versus the two-to-six months that many other solutions require.

Reduced complexity in CMDB CI population, attribute and relationships import and export that allows for better data access, more effective updates, and enhanced change detection.

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Improved service availability by reducing Mean-Time-to-Repair through improved currency and visibility into CMDB data and configuration changes.

More effective software license management – through improved accuracy in inventory and usage tracking.

Improved auditing efficiency through templates and cleaner, more visible and more accurate data.

A more current and consistent foundation for applying application dependency insights through application discovery tools and domain expertise.

Support for Cloud computing environments – including OS, SAN, and VLAN monitoring. These include updates that can be used for chargeback and inventory accounting across multiple Cloud services.

For software and hardware manufacturers, a proven program for integration of disparate systems, with global support, consistent updates to support end-to-end IT service automation.

Seamless CMDB Connectors The current list of Seamless CMDB Connectors is as follows:

Microsoft Systems Center Configuration Manager, and Systems Center Operation Manager

VMware – vCenter Server

Storage

HP Network Node Manager, Network Automation, Service Automation Reporter, BSA Essentials, and Storage Essentials

BlackBerry Enterprise Server

Cisco – Network Compliance Manager, and Resource Manager Essentials

Collabnet Team Forge (2010)

IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Mapping

Universal ETL loader to CMDB for custom data sources

XML, Excel “XLS”, CSV, flat file, ODBC, and JDBC

The Universal Connector allows for other integration requirements but doesn’t come with the same range of pre-defined templates and policies.

The software is licensed by the connector or enterprise depending on the data source. Pricing is available at www.seamlessti.com/products.html – distribution is direct or via our partners.

Design and ServicesThe Seamless CMDB Connector Platform can run on most Linux, Unix and Windows servers. The Connectors don’t require agents, but acquire information securely through the network and authentication credentials, and then mine the CI, relationship and attribute information based on a Configuration File using a Java-based Connector Code to establish and manage sessions. A GUI is designed for adminis-trators to easily and quickly remap CI-related information for CMDB population. Connectors can run reports on 45 different metric types out of the box – this includes views into data accuracy and relevance for CMDB governance.

While Seamless provides extensive normalization and “data cleaning” and “transformation” to support very fast CMDB population, it leaves it up to the CMDB to reconcile data across multiple MDRs. The result has proven to be up to four times faster than other approaches. This also differentiates it from other investments, such as some application dependency mapping tools that are designed to reconcile discovery tools prior to CMDB population. The Seamless approach differs from application dependency mapping solutions as well in that it loads a service ontology which enables application service-to-infrastructure inter-dependencies. When application dependency mapping tools are present, Seamless typically finds that their solutions are used as reference points for manual population rather than a fully automated linkage.

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PRODUCT BRIEF | � ©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“To some degree, I think the focus on application dependency mapping for the service is a little like the attention that carriers gave to managing the ‘last mile’ of network connectivity to the end-user – as it’s the hardest to manage, but is the key to true service management,” says Johnson. “Getting the right information about what defines an application and service and where and what their dependencies are in real-time, is clearly a lot harder than just building a real-time hardware and software infrastructure entity-relationship model of the data center. And of course the technologies to do this are for the most part still new and expensive, and our tools move the customers to that goal in record time. Service management gaps are directly correlated with the process maturity and capability of the organization in working through the application mapping “finger printing” issues, which require process and daily work instruction changes.”

Seamless also offers global post-sale support and services for its Connectors suite. These include a one-week basic package to get the connector up and running along with reconciliation and integration to the service desk. A more extensive services engagement includes domain guidance on which CMDB strategy and end-to-end automation use cases to support BSM, change automation, Cloud and data center automation including appropriate for the Definitive Software Library (DSL) for auditing and storing authorized ver-sions of approved software license configuration items.

One Seamless customer is a large U.S. utilities company with broad geographic reach across many states. It has an IT organization of about 1,000 to support about 25,000 employees. The IT organization is divided into three main areas – CIO/Business Analyst, Strategic Planning and Compliance, and Computing and Network Services. Computing and Network Services is further sub-divided into Application Services, Infrastructure Services, and Client Services (desktops, laptops, help desk, etc.). Application Services works closely with Infrastructure Services, and also supports key management software applications, such as those used for service desk and CMDB. EMA spoke with the lead for Application Services and the BMC/Remedy expert in Application Services.

This company had invested in Clarify for its help desk, but was seeking an architecture more suited to strategic process support, driven in part through a strong commitment to ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), which its leveraging as a “foundation for a lot of our planning and decision making. We know ITIL is best understood as a set of guidelines and may not fit every company. But we’re committed to it here.”

BMC was selected after a careful evaluation. The initial focus was change and configuration management largely because incident management was “fairly well defined. Change and configuration were where we were experiencing the greatest pain.”

There are two key existing third-party data sources: Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and HP’s Service Automation Reporter (SAR). The company uses SAR for network configuration and Unix and SCCM for Microsoft servers and desktops. A third key source for the CMDB is an in-house developed repository that provides application-to-infrastructure linkages, which is populated manually.

Seamless was brought in to evaluate accelerating CMDB population from Microsoft SCCM and HP SAR. After a trial of several months, the Seamless solution was selected. “It was an easy choice when we weighed the consequences of redeploying our internal resources for building the connectors in-house. Time to value was fast-- a small subset of the overall project. It took only a few days to install, configure and tweak with a few follow up calls from a very responsive Seamless support group. If you include several adjustments for data content over the last year, it’s probably about two-weeks of time from our IT shop’s perspective versus the several months it might have taken otherwise. And the great thing for us – was that it wasn’t just a raw framework, but the connector came with a best-practices map for source/destination between the CMDB and SAR and SCCM.”

This company now has its capabilities for change and configuration management up and running, and is now looking to expand the deployment to support incident and asset management. The customer has also recommended Seamless to other potential IT organizations because of the time-efficiency, reliability and effectiveness of Seamless connectors/accelerators.

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EMA PerspectiveSeamless Technologies has introduced a provocative and effective solution targeted at the thorny issues of CMDB and CMS data population. It is provocative, ironically, because in its simplicity it has circumvented more elaborate design points that attempt to do more, but that typically end in achieving a lot less. By focus-ing on speed, simplicity, data integrity, simple process changes and specific benefits versus more abstract and all encompassing approaches, Seamless has made a meaningful step in accelerating CMDB System deployments with clear and proven results.

EMA believes that CMDB/CMS investments are transformative and, when associated with the right orga-nizational and process awareness, can be perhaps the single most catalytic force in maturing IT into a more effective and business aligned resource. Seamless CMDB Connectors should be viewed as valuable allies in supporting these initiatives when directed at pragmatic and achievable results.

About EMA Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in going “beyond the surface” to provide deep insight across the full spectrum of IT management technologies. EMA analysts lever-age a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consult-ing services for enterprise IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or follow EMA on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ema_research).

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