Ability To Automate CMDBs Is Primary Adoption Concern: Survey

Market analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates recently released the findings of its report, ‘CMDB System Deployments in 2009: From Philosophy to Federation’, which focused on the trends and requirements as configuration management database (CMDB) systems evolve towards a more federated model. The study surveyed 162 industry executives, managers and professionals and while Enterprise Management Associates is not releasing head-to-head results, the firm announced that both EMC’s application dependency mapping (Smarts Application Discovery Manager) and CMDB (Infra) solutions ranked among the highest competitively in terms of customer satisfaction.

“Both EMC Smarts Application Discovery Manager and EMC Infra substantially outperformed the industry average for customer satisfaction, both individually and collectively,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. “Given these results, we believe EMC has the potential to emerge as an innovator in the Configuration Management Systems (CMS) market.”

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Core to the survey, Enterprise Management Associates reports a majority of respondents recognise the cost-savings associated with CMDB deployments and point to these technologies as key to helping companies pull out of the economic downturn. Additionally, EMA notes that while overall IT spending is declining, investments in CMDB initiatives remained flat in 2009. According to the report: “This is a clear sign that more and more IT organisations are grasping the fact that CMDB investments represent a creative approach to gaining operational efficiencies, minimising risk, and optimising capex assets through automated insights into duplicative, unused, or inappropriately licenced assets.”

Finally, Enterprise Management Associates notes the ability to automate CMDBs was a primary concern for most respondents, as they ranked automation as the number one feature required when choosing to adopt new solutions. For application dependency mapping, the survey reports primary challenges as: “administrative overhead, lack of currency, cost and lack of visibility into how the application dependency mapping tool identifies specific CIs.”