The second approach embeds the CMDB in one or more products in a suite. A helpdesk application will also include a CMDB, for example. For companies that have a management vendor of choice, this approach provides the fastest path to integration because other products in the suite will share the data schema, easing reconciliation, and be able to invoke other applications without the need to create connections. On the downside, third-party federation will take additional effort.
Altiris embeds a CMDB within several products, including its Service & Asset Management Suite and its Inventory offering. The company's strategy, which centers around tightly coupling the CMDB with its own products, plays to Altiris' strengths as a leader in the midmarket asset-management and helpdesk arenas.
Still, Altiris recognizes the importance of third-party federation and provides specific connectors for products such as BMC's Remedy Help Desk. It also has a general Connector Solution to acquire data from other stores, such as Excel files and financial or HR apps. Altiris doesn't have strong application-dependency mapping, but told us it has a "short timeline" for delivering such capabilities.
BMC has spent the past several years developing and executing its CMDB strategy. Compared with other setups, BMC's CMDB is the most tightly integrated with other products in its portfolio. It offers its Atrium CMDB as a component of several of its Remedy offerings, as well as a standalone product. This means BMC can provide the benefits of a CMDB to its existing base while competing to offer a CMDB to non-BMC customers.
The Remedy family is key to BMC's CMDB success. Its Remedy customers give BMC a valuable footprint the company can expand on, while other CMDB vendors inevitably put Remedy at the top of their lists for third-party federation and have APIs or dedicated connectors available. Thus, BMC becomes a strong candidate to be the primary CMDB in an organization or at least a key data store. BMC also remains closely aligned to ITIL. It provides out-of-the-box workflows to help companies implement ITIL best practices using BMC tools.
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