CA, IBM First to Demonstrate CMDB Federation, Interoperability

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--itSMF FUSION – CA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CA) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the ability to share information between their respective configuration management databases (CMDBs) and management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management systems and service desk solutions. The interoperability demonstration, based on the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and debuting this week at itSMF Fusion ’08 in San Francisco, gives customers a way to better consolidate IT data in a multi-vendor environment by linking CA and IBM data sources for a single view of their IT systems and components, and the relationships among them.

“The demonstration unveiled today shows CA’s commitment to helping our customers share and integrate important IT information no matter what vendors’ system manages that data. This supports organizations as they work to manage the service lifecycle whether it’s through ITIL guidance or other service management best practices.”

This is the first public demonstration of any two software vendors’ systems incorporating the CMDBf specification developed by the CMDB Federation working group in October 2007. The specification, which has since been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for development as a standard, was authored by industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu Limited, HP, IBM and Microsoft.

This CMDB Federation demonstration shows businesses they can successfully link data sources and asset information in a multi-vendor environment to simplify IT service management initiatives.

“Businesses recognize that reducing the complexity in managing their multi-vendor IT environments can help them save money, ease operations, and enable other IT initiatives for improved service management,” said Brian Bell, senior vice president and general manager, CA Service Management. “The demonstration unveiled today shows CA’s commitment to helping our customers share and integrate important IT information no matter what vendors’ system manages that data. This supports organizations as they work to manage the service lifecycle whether it’s through ITIL guidance or other service management best practices.”

The use of open source software from the Eclipse COSMOS project helped CA and IBM accelerate implementation of the CMDBf specification. In turn, the two companies plan to contribute code from the interoperability demonstration to the COSMOS project as reference code.

“This example of federation illustrates IBM's commitment to work with other software vendors through open standards to help our customers simplify and automate their IT environments,” said Alan Ganek, CTO and vice president of Autonomic Computing, IBM Tivoli Software. “By championing these industry service management initiatives, we provide our customers with greater visibility, control and automation over their disparate IT systems and help them to increase the return from their IT investments. Our joint contributions to the Eclipse COSMOS project also ease partners' efforts to use the CMDBf specification by providing an open-source reference implementation.”

The IBM and CA demonstration will simulate a post-corporate merger scenario where two IT infrastructures managed by different tools – IBM Tivoli CCMDB and CA CMDB – provide business services spanning both infrastructures. The demonstration will show two-way federation, dynamic updates, topology changes after federation, and on-demand retrieval of the federated detailed resource data. The demonstration will be shown in both the CA booth 708 and the IBM booth 626 at itSMF Fusion at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Sept. 7-13.

About CA

CA (NASDAQ: CA) is the world’s leading independent IT management software company. With CA's Enterprise IT Management (EITM) vision and expertise, organizations can more effectively govern, manage and secure IT to optimize business performance and sustain competitive advantage. For more information, visit www.ca.com.

About IBM

For more on IBM Service Management, please visit www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/it-service-management/.