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CMDBs: An IT Goldmine?: Page 16 of 24

Celebrate Diversity

As the CMDB market grows, vendors are differentiating themselves through the capabilities that can be built on top of a CMDB, for example, ensuring that changes are associated with a work order. BMC's CMDB has a function to compare the state of a CI in its database to actual state based on the latest discovery of that CI. If there's a discrepancy, the CMDB will look for a change request. If an approved request exists, the CMDB will update the CI attribute; if not, it can trigger an incident or an alert.

Managed Objects has a similar feature, in which the CMDB reconciles infrastructure changes with trouble tickets in a Remedy system. If a change doesn't have an associated ticket, the CMDB can request an investigation.

Through a partnership with mValent, HP's Universal CMDB also can compare existing configuration settings to spot divergence from an ideal state. The HP-mValent partnership provides automated remediation as well.

As CMDBs mature, IT can expect to delve into more analytics around real-time monitoring and analysis of all the components of a business service, deep root-cause analysis and advanced warning of emerging problems.