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CMDBs: An IT Goldmine?: Page 9 of 24

Overall, the CMDB market is in its infancy, but healthy growth is projected. Forrester Research estimates that the number of installations will go from around 600 today to more than 4,000 in the next five years.

Until a standard emerges, however, IT will have to put some effort into linking disparate data stores. If two vendors are established partners, or if one specializes in integration, APIs or other connectors may be available to link the CMDB with the data store out of the box. In most cases, however, you'll need one or both of the vendors' professional services teams and/or a consultant to make federation work. And once links are established, proceed cautiously when one product or another is upgraded, because changes could break the integration. Such issues will surely increase operating expenses over time.

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With the potential to dominate a customer's IT management purchases, it's no wonder IT vendors are rallying around the CMDB banner. Last year saw a flurry of acquisitions designed to beef up vendors' CMDB offerings or get them into the market. HP purchased Mercury, CA bought Cendura, Symantec snapped up Relicore, and EMC added nLayers to its stable. And in late 2005, IBM picked up a company called Collation. The common thread among these acquisitions: application-dependency mapping.

Application-dependency mapping is a key technology for CMDBs; it identifies and creates a visual map of the devices that support an application, including servers, routers and switches. Application-dependency mapping also looks at software components and code dependencies that an application relies on, as well as network configurations (for instance, routing tables and port assignments) that allow apps to travel across an enterprise.