BMC are at the old bait and switch again over CMDB

Chokey chokes! Chokey the Chimp hasn't seen such a pile of Crap in a long time. Take a look at this classic piece of vendor double-talk. Tell them the joys of owning a MacLaren F1, then describe the value your Mum derived from buying a new Daihatsu to get to the shops. Yours for only a million dollars! In fact this article isn't even describing a MacLaren: it is describing a Jetsons air-car with virtual hyperdrive.

When it comes to Crap, the first big lump is the analogy of the article: "The CMDB as the Brain of IT". If the CMDB is a brain then my bank statement is my accountant. Chucking data in a bucket does not create knowledge.

But the best bit is the description itself. Talk about pie-in-the-sky fantasy crap: play Buzzword Bingo as you read it.

An effective CMDB should provide several advanced technologies to help process and manage the complexity associated with your IT data. These technologies should include reconciliation, federation, automatic discovery and dependency mapping, dynamic service modeling, inventory and configuration management, orchestration capabilities, and dashboards and analytics...

And it is all so easy

Through federation, the owners of these data stores retain authority and control, but the data is mapped to the CMDB common data model, which permits easy access by applications, such as business service management (BSM) solutions and other tools...

Not a word about the absence of a usable industry standard, the enormous effort required to design build and maintain integration, the huge reconsiliation problem, or the massive manual effort to derive and maintain relationships.

If you paint too fantastic a picture, the punters might suspect you of onanism, so make sure you introduce a hint of grey skies, then quickly offer the magic pixie dust to clear them again

Even with federation, however, it’s no easy task to determine exactly what you own, where it’s located, and how it’s being used—unless you can automate the process. Automated discovery and dependency mapping will help you ensure that your CMDB is accurate and complete by discovering all assets in your IT infrastructure, along with their physical and logical dependencies and their relationships to the services they support.

Oh, that's alright then.

And now foot to the floor again

Once you’ve discovered all of your IT assets and collected them in your federated CMDB, you will want to map their physical and logical topologies, as well as their application and service dependencies, to gain optimal visibility into your complete IT environment. Then, you can use dynamic service modeling to create visual and dynamic maps representing the relationships of services to IT and business users and processes—even as your IT environment continually changes.

What a blinding spray of crap. It's like being behind a cow in an apple orchard.

The only redeeming feature of this story is the offer of a way to manage all the crap: B.S. Management, or BSM. Without that you're going to drown in it.

Having offered us a flurry of unobtainable, vastly expensive crap that sounds like heaven, the article does the bait and switch and talks about the benefits that a healthcare organisation derived from basic asset management. The ROI of simple ITAM is real, which is why CMDB vendors have to switch to that to show a happy real-life story. But they don't want to sell you basic ITAM - they want to sell you a MacLaren F1 and describe it as a Jetson's aircar.

Comments

ring-in

It occurs to me that i have wrongly labelled this "bait and switch". Bait and switch is when they promise you the Maclaren then sell you a Diahatsu. While there is some of that here, this is more that they promise you a Maclaren, measure the track time of a Daihatsu to prove it works, then sell you a Maclaren that is too hard for you to drive or maintain. The Aussies call that a "ring-in" when a different horse runs under the colours of another.

it seems to me that most of the benefits credited to CMDB in most cases are in fact benefits of the much simpler asset management. have a list of assets. Track location, warranties, number of licenses, lease expirations, and depreciation. Huge returns on little investments, and none of it requires the 6-lite V12, twin-turbo, carbon-fibre-and-titanium-alloy, computer-controlled technology and 20-man pit crew of a CMDB.

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