Vendors love to promise to play nicely

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2013-02-05 04:31
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Hey, remember all the fine words about CMDBf? or networkedhelpdesk.org? Vendors love to promise to play nicely because it helps overcome buyer concerns and close the sales. But it is pretty rare for it to ever come to anything. SNMP was an exception. Don't fall for the sweet promises: whatever the vendors say, they won't love each other in the morning.

CMDBf was going to be a standard for CMDBs from disparate vendors to federate together, so that you wouldn't risk vendor lock-in by committing to any one CMDB repository. The last activity was April 2010 when the DMTF issued version 1.0.1. It must be real mature if it hasn't changed in nearly three years. Why not ask how those committed members of the CMDB Federation task force - BMC, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, and Microsoft - are coming along with their much-hyped support for the CMDBf standard. How many of you bought their tools reassured that you would be able to buy technologies from competing vendors in future? Ha! Suckered.

Here's another one: networkedhelpdesk.org. This was supposed to be a standard for service desk tools to exchange tickets, so that it didn't matter what your subsidiaries or partners used. Announced two years ago, it didn't even have the gravitas of CMDBf; networkedhelpdesk had only a few vendors that anyone had even heard of. How many of those vendors have actually implemented the interface? Who cares, since the probability that you'd have any TWO of that obscure bunch is about zero. How many big-name vendors have come on board in the intervening two years? Guess.

I bet readers can recall a few more of these vanishing love-ins.

Perish the thought that I should be skeptical about high principles and fine ideals. But in case it has escaped your notice, this industry isn't about easing world hunger or eradicating leprosy or even preserving heritage. ITSM is business and people are in it to make a buck. Don't be suckered by appeals to righteousness from the major vendors. All of you ought to know better by now.

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