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CMDBs: An IT Goldmine?: Page 8 of 24

All this reuse sounds good, but the problem is, the consortium is an exclusive club. Membership was expanded from the original founders--BMC, Fujitsu, HP and IBM--to include CA and Microsoft. But other players, such as EMC and Managed Objects, have been rebuffed.

"We can't support having an unlimited number [of participants]," Johnson says. "There are discussions for other vendors to participate in some capacity." We don't see this as a promising attitude for a draft specification purportedly undertaken to promote interoperability in heterogeneous environments.

It's also not clear just when a specification will emerge. The original goal was December 2006, but the release of a draft has been pushed out to an unspecified date this year.

For the time being, the federation working group lets major vendors pay lip service to the notion of interoperability standards. It also gives them a significant time period--at least two or three years before standards-based products hit the market--in which to corral customers with the promise of simple, in-suite integration.

Johnson says a lack of standards hasn't stopped enterprises that want CMDBs from deployment. One reason is, they tend to start small, with a subset of IT assets and CMDBs populated with rudimentary data. "They will grow it over time as products and processes mature," he says.