How ASG’s MetaCMDB Strategy Enables More Effective ... · ITIL v3 introduces the concept of a...

How ASG’s MetaCMDB Strategy Enables More Effective Business Service ManagementA White Paper Prepared for ASG August 2007

Table of Contents

Executive Introduction.......................................................................................................................................................................1

What is a CMDB System? ................................................................................................................................................................1

The CMDB Concept ...................................................................................................................................................................2

Creating the CMDB System: the Journey is also the Destination ........................................................................................3

What are the Most Critical Requirements for a CMDB System? ...............................................................................................3

Technical Requirements for BSM and CMDBs .......................................................................................................................3

ASG’s CMDB Strategy – a System Optimized for Effective BSM ...........................................................................................4

ASG’s Business Service Platform ...............................................................................................................................................5

ASG’s MetaCMDB System ....................................................................................................................................................5

Scalability, Extensibility and Versatile Data Access ............................................................................................................6

Benefits in Visualization, Analysis and Integration ...........................................................................................................6

ASG’s “Business Layer” & Real-Time Monitoring ............................................................................................................8

ASG-becubic .............................................................................................................................................................................8

EMA’s Perspective .............................................................................................................................................................................10

About ASG | www.asg.com ............................................................................................................................................................10

How ASG’s MetaCMDB Strategy Enables More Effective Business Service Management

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©2007 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Executive IntroductionAs IT evolves towards a more business-aligned position, it must seek out new ways of working that support more effective operations, service creation and service deliv-ery. These include technologies, processes and a culture that supports higher levels of accountability, as well as more dynamic responsiveness to business needs.

This report looks at two of the most fundamental and arguably two of the most conflicted concepts surround-ing these requirements: Business Service Management (BSM) and the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) system. In essence, this report focuses on CMDB requirements as they support a BSM strategy, and then highlights ASG’s offerings in that context.

According to EMA research, BSM means many differ-ent things to many different adopters, and conversely, while many vendors market to BSM, its precise mean-ing often remains muddy. Not surprisingly, many IT organizations still struggle to separate BSM from SLM, or Service Level Management, in which management is directed at SLAs (Service Level Agreements), designed to support both business and technical values. But as more and more IT services become directly relevant to revenue creation, and even business model creation, traditional SLM becomes too restrictive a concept to address many new emerging requirements for dynamic business alignment.

The term “BSM” therefore becomes a useful container in which to cast the many complex requirements for unifying IT operations and refocusing IT away from introverted, technical metrics and towards more human-centric, and/or business objectives. As such it becomes a model for IT management, embracing many disciplines, not that different from the IT Infrastructure Library’s (ITIL’s) notion of IT Service Management.

Another one of ITIL’s concepts is the CMDB, which in v3 takes on a more systemic profile as a “Configuration Management System” or CMS, as will be discussed below. A CMDB system consists of the tools and da-tabases used to manage data in support of IT services. Within a CMDB system, a core CMDB provides a single access point to many types of IT management data in-cluding information related to IT service assets and their relationships. The CMDB system also includes informa-tion and data sources referencing Incidents, Problems,

Known Errors, Changes and Releases. All of this data is represented within the CMDB as Configuration Items or CIs. The power of the CMDB system comes in part from the federation, or distributed sharing and integra-tion, of CI data across the various management systems along with the intelligent formation of relationships among the CIs.

These strengths enable the CMDB system to become a core enabler for managing IT from the end-user and busi-ness perspective. The CMDB system provides the ability to view capabilities provided by IT as business services rather than a collection of discrete technology services. This higher stage of IT management evolution can ap-propriately be called “Business Service Management.” EMA research is demonstrating again and again that meaningful BSM cannot be effectively achieved without a CMDB system.

ASG has a distinctive CMDB offering that can enable superior service management, as well as application and service lifecycle management. ASG’s CMDB system ties together the monitoring of disparate underlying systems, applications and devices, maps them to the business ser-vices they support, visualizing their inter-relationships through dynamic dashboards. These visualization capa-bilities allow technical and business managers to view operations at a high level and drill down to a granular level of data. Given the benefits and implications of this functionality and architecture, ASG’s BSM and CMDB solutions warrant short-list attention from any IT orga-nization seeking a meaningful answer to BSM.

It is the objective of this report to examine more specifi-cally what CMDB systems require and how they evolve as a foundation to shed light on ASG’s BSM and CMDB system offerings.

What is a CMDB System? A CMDB system provides an enabling foundation for virtually all IT processes, many of which are themselves critical enablers for BSM. In many IT environments, a whole host of management tools create, collect and/or depend on information about IT services and their un-derlying IT infrastructure. A robust CMDB system, in combination with appropriate management processes, enables those tools and the people using them to share this information and use it to improve their individual and combined management capabilities.


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Without a CMDB system, management information is found, when it can be found at all, in a number of siloed management data repositories, each associated with a separate management tool. For instance, systems man-agement tools may collect and maintain system infor-mation such as hardware information (CPU type, RAM, disk volumes, etc.) and software (operating system type and version, installed applications, etc.), and a patch management tool may gather information on required patches versus actual patches installed. At the same time, network management tools may collect configuration, topology and status information for switches, routers and other network devices. However, while each type of management tool is sure to collect domain appropriate information, they don’t individually collect or manage information that addresses business services as a whole.

Enter the CMDB system, which associates this broad and varied information from disparate sources into a single trusted source of insight about the infrastructure and its services, often with associated operational and customer “owners.” Once a CMDB system has evolved sufficiently to support reconciled management informa-tion across the management domains, the stage is set for cohesive BSM, in which IT services and business priori-ties can be dynamically aligned.

The CMDB Concept The CMDB concept has gained popularity for a number of reasons. First, it has grown in recognition as ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, has been adopted. ITIL is a best practice IT management framework emphasizing IT as a provider of services for the business. ITIL has advantages such as its widely accepted terminology, as well as comprehensive cover-age of the processes surrounding IT service delivery and support. ITIL also formalized the CMDB concept. In doing so, ITIL anticipated and documented what is becoming a tidal wave of interest in re-architecting man-agement investments towards more holistic designs in order to support more cohesive processes.

It should be pointed out that ITIL v2 describes CIs that are stored in a CMDB as a selected set of assets and resources that support a critical business service and therefore require attention from IT. ITIL v2 is the most widely used version of ITIL with v3 having just been re-leased in June 2007. However, ITIL v3 does a better job of defining the CMDB and its function. What is differ-

ent with v3 is that it recognizes the broader v2 CMDB concept as the Configuration Management System and does so in a way compatible with EMA’s perspective of the CMDB system. Like EMA, ITIL v3 recognizes the potential use of multiple CMDBs including a core CMDB that federates with other CMDBs, which in turn federate with trusted data sources. And significantly, ITIL v3 introduces the concept of a Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) which coincides almost perfectly with EMA’s view that CMDB systems are de-signed to support and optimize analytic and visualization capabilities in support of BSM.

In addition to ITIL, a second reason the CMDB con-cept has gained popularity is based on another unmet need – the need for data integration across management tools. Most commonly, IT organizations utilize tools from a variety of sources, including different vendors, open source tools and internally developed capabilities. These tools each have unique architectures, interfaces and methods for integration. While vendors traditionally have not prioritized integration with related products from competitors, the concept of a federated CMDB system facilitates the sharing of data across management tools, including those from different vendors, and as such is forcing vendors to adopt a new approach in coming to market, just as it is enabling new ways of working more effectively across IT.

Decisions

Service Knowledge Management System

Configuration Management System

Citizen CMDB Citizen CMDB

Trusted SourceTrusted Source Trusted Source

Core CMDB

Figure 1: EMA’s systemic approach to federated CMDB capabilities


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Creating the CMDB System: the Journey is also the DestinationIt should be stressed that CMDB systems do not evolve from simply making an investment in “silver bullet” technologies. They require significant cultural and pro-cess planning up front. CMDB systems, to be effective, require getting people, processes, management tools and management data aligned and working together. This does not happen without vision and commitment from senior IT leaders to help drive teamwork across exist-ing organizational boundaries. And since many of those teams will remain organizationally separate, they’ll need to develop a culture, with senior management guidance, of sharing data and working together on problems. They will also need tools, processes and data that support this new approach.

Not coincidentally, one of the key stage setting require-ments for CMDB systems – the identification of trusted sources across IT – is also in itself one of the key benefits and objectives for CMDBs. Overcoming the fragmenta-tion resulting from disparate management data reposi-tories, and the fact that they are traditionally owned and maintained by siloed teams, turns out to be a key driver for phase one CMDB adoptions. This requirement also emphasizes the systemic role of CMDBs beyond being a single monolithic database.

EMA started referring to the CMDB system, rather than just the CMDB, because in reality successful deploy-ments depended on identifying a federated matrix of resources, repositories and technologies – including data integration and reconciliation, but also including discovery, identity and access management, effective visualization and analytics, and some degree of work-flow, just to name a few. The conclusion was that for a “CMDB” to reach its full potential, in part as an enabler for service driven management, a true system of coor-dinated tools, data repositories, processes and people would be required.

What are the Most Critical Requirements for a CMDB System?A Configuration Management system has a number of requirements including addressing challenges that are organizational and cultural in nature as described above. Organizational commitment requires a dedication among a critical mass of IT professionals to move ahead with

change. An EMA research survey showed that more than 50% of the respondents feel that the CMDB or CMDB system will affect more than 75% of the individuals across their IT organization. This requires a culture of communication, dialog and expectation setting, versus one of siloed, isolated professionals. Often a combina-tion of executive support combined with a dedicated resource who has established communication skills can be the single most effective catalyst in overcoming tradi-tional cultural constraints.

Technical Requirements for BSM and CMDBsThe technical requirements for effective BSM and those for a CMDB system are naturally aligned. Effective BSM requires acquisition of master data or “truth” from the IT infrastructure, including status data from monitor-ing/surveillance systems. Therefore, methods for storing relatively static data while keeping up with more volatile data are needed. Moreover, context is critical if IT is to truly manage to the service rather than to its parts. Ultimately, configuration, performance and status data from the infrastructure must all be linked to services.

However, achieving all this through a CMDB system poses some fairly specific technical requirements:

Base requirements – data extensibility: Some of the base requirements of the core CMDB within the broader CMDB system are similar to other enterprise software products and include performance, scalability and extensibility. For example, the data model must be flexible and extensible. As discussed, a broad and diverse set of management tools, each with unique management data repositories containing a variety of management data types, are typically in use within an IT organization. So core CMDB users must be able to freely add new CI types, add custom CI attributes and define a wide variety of relationships among CI types.

Scalability: While the core CMDB may serve as a directory, or lookup and pointer service, for much of the data, it will still need to scale sufficiently to support the number of CIs under management. This can easily reach hundreds of thousands of CIs for large IT organizations. Initially, the number of CIs under management can be tuned by including only those required for the first phase

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of the CMDB system project. Over time and with a fully evolved CMDB implementation, all CIs under management will be included one way or another through the full federated system. This will require not just scale but also performance to meet the needs of the business.

Pointers to trusted sources: Other requirements of the core CMDB are related to the distributed, federated nature of the data under management, and even more specifically to the unique demands of a CMDB system. The core CMDB must have a directory capability or the means to point to trusted sources for accessing CI information. Metadata or data about the CI data could be used to describe where and how to access the full content of a given CI.

Relationship modeling: As a related feature, the core CMDB should be able to model multiple relationships between and among CIs and their attributes. Modeling must be able to support a variety of relationships targeted at business and operational relevance, or else the CMDB system will degenerate into a laundry list of data.

Data reconciliation: One of the more important capabilities for a core CMDB is data reconciliation, including reconciliation of data from potentially conflicting sources. For instance, management tools may collect and cache their data on different schedules, each having the “truth” about the CI, but at different points in time. Therefore, the core CMDB must have a facility for reconciling these differences. Just how this is done will be driven by policies unique to each organization, service or even CI. So the reconciliation facility must, like the CMDB system as a whole, also be flexible and extensible.

Discovery: Discovery can include a wide range of capabilities, from systems and network topologies, systems and network configurations, application topologies and behavior models, and application-to-infrastructure dependency mapping. While there are tradeoffs across the breadth and depth of discovered data, without assimilating all of the appropriate data needed to capture critical CI-to-CI, and CI-to-service relationships, the

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CMDB system will lose value. Effective BSM also depends on capturing these relationships and keeping them current dynamically. Starting with the service view, IT users should be able to drill down on CI information related to their particular role, whether application or data center or network management related.

Visualization: CMDB systems are enablers, not ends in themselves. Without effective capabilities for analyzing and presenting information relevant to decision making, or even to automating critical IT actions, the CMDB system becomes an untenable investment. But as a dynamic resource for effective real-time and reporting visualization capabilities, a CMDB system can not only empower BSM, but help to transform the culture and efficiency of IT.

Workflow: The core CMDB provides extensive data integration between management tools from different vendors. Workflow extends this integration capability to include process integration. Workflow helps enable staff in different departments focused on different technology types to work together to manage the end-to-end service rather than struggling independently and in isolation within their technology domains.

Analytics: Once the CMS brings together the reconciled data for the CIs, even a first phase CMS with just a subset of all CIs, analytics begin to help answer questions about services under management. Is the service dependent on expected infrastructure elements? Are there orphaned infrastructure items on which no service depends? It is an investment in analytic technologies, many of which are purchased separately from a core CMDB, that begin to transform a CMDB system into a powerful engine in support of BSM.

ASG’s CMDB Strategy – a System Optimized for Effective BSMFor more than twenty years, ASG has been a leading provider of enterprise systems management software solutions. ASG software solutions are now deployed at more than 8,000 of the world’s largest and most suc-cessful companies including American Express, General Electric, HSBC and Verizon.

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ASG’s solutions are designed to address the everyday, tactical issues faced by most IT departments and business managers: managing complexity, facilitating compliance, managing information overload, increasing productivity and controlling costs by enabling IT operations teams to monitor and manage the disparate systems in their IT infrastructures. This includes the management of desktops, servers, and mainframe environments, as well as the network and the applications themselves. And in fact, it is within the application management arena that ASG has invested some of its most compelling, lifecycle management capabilities.

Another one of ASG’s more striking, and so far under-recognized achievements is the evolution of an archi-tecture and design point that supports a high degree of modularity in gathering, storing, sharing, analyzing and visualizing critical information relevant to BSM. At the heart of that design is ASG’s MetaCMDB, which is the focus of this report.

ASG’s Business Service Platform

Figure 2: ASG Business Service Management Vision

ASG currently offers a broad-based BSM solution that has at its heart what EMA believes is a very flexible and robust capability for CMDB system integration. This CMDB system ties together the performance, configu-ration, asset management, scheduling, service desk and dependency data from the various “trusted sources” (including “citizen” MetaCMDBs), correlates the data enabling a MasterCMDB, and visualizes it through a

series of the out-of-the-box dashboards. These can support both operations personnel and IT executives in assessing service quality, troubleshooting problems, optimizing infrastructure and managing critical IT as-sets. ASG’s solution also helps senior management make business decisions by identifying, correlating and aligning the relationships between IT investments and overall business performance.

Figure 3: ASG Business Service Platform

The foundation of ASG’s Business Service Platform is their MetaCMDB system which contains:

Dynamic, industry-specific dashboards

A core MetaCMDB comprised of ASG-Rochade™, a relationship mapping metadata data repository, combined with ASG’s Unified Management Architecture™ (UMA), an open adapter bus architecture that connects to third-party products

Automated Asset and Application discovery and dependency mapping via ASG’s BSP Asset management™, ASG becubic™ and third party products

BSM applications consisting of ASG’s suite of monitoring and analytics applications, as well as the ability to integrate with similar tools from a wide range of external vendors

ASG’s MetaCMDB SystemASG’s MetaCMDB strategy, up until now at least, has been one of the best kept secrets in the industry. What’s distinctive about ASG’s MetaCMDB system is the breadth of disparate services, systems, applications and

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devices that can be monitored through ASG’s real-time, customizable adapters and correlated back to the busi-ness services through ASG-Rochade and the dynamic dashboards it supports.

ASG’s MetaCMDB can serve as a standalone CMDB system for companies that have not developed or pur-chased a CMDB system. Through its proven strengths in metadata repositories and its experience in integrating multi-brand technologies, ASG’s MetaCMDB is also able to serve as a service-impact-oriented MasterCMDB. As such, it will federate and synchronize performance and availability data from multiple management data reposi-tories and associated CMDBs to provide real-time status for the enterprise with distinctive levels of scalability.

Another distinctive feature of the platform is the analytic and visualization capabilities created by the combination of the dashboards with application relationship mapping and the behavioral mapping capabilities of ASG-becu-bic. ASG’s visualization capabilities allow managers to both view operations at a high level and also drill down to a granular level of data, including source-to-target data lineage mapping for planned, new, or pre-existing applications, in order to pinpoint problem issues.

ASG’s MetaCMDB system, based on its scalable UMA architecture, supports large numbers of IT assets, CIs and users, by consolidating and reconciling CI informa-tion from a wide range of information sources. ASG’s Business Service Platform also provides a mature set of technologies to automate proactive remediation based on user-defined rules. For example, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be programmed as Configuration Items (CIs) in the core MetaCMDB, and an automa-tion capability will compare the real-time monitoring data (measured via response to synthetic transactions vs. passive surveillance) to the SLA values – issuing an alert and/or opening a trouble ticket when user defined thresholds are met.

Scalability, Extensibility and Versatile Data AccessAs enterprise architectures become more and more dy-namic and diverse, metadata management becomes an essential technology for cutting through informational complexity in order to facilitate change, meet or exceed SLAs, and support compliance. Metadata management can provide critical pointers to key sources of informa-tion in context with policies for governance, access, and

“trusted sources” for tracking CIs and their attributes in order to remediate service degradations, maintain secu-rity, deploy new services, and accurately document regu-latory compliance. Accurate information on CIs is criti-cal to the support of key Service Delivery and Service Support processes such as Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and Release Management. These, in effect, become both technological and process foundations to build towards successful BSM.

The heart of ASG’s MetaCMDB system is the ASG-Rochade metadata repository, which can provide both business and technical users with a single point of truth about data and systems across the enterprise. It is built on an object-based database, rather than a strictly hierar-chic relational database, therefore investing it with great flexibility in assigning relationships. ASG’s MetaCMDB can potentially model and relate virtually “anything to anything” through its extensible data model, its version-ing support to minimize migration issues, its impact and root cause analysis – as examples of a few features. This functionality of relating virtually “anything to anything” is what enables ASG to provide a MasterCMDB. IT professionals can add new CI types, define a wide va-riety of relationships among CI types and add custom CI attributes.

ASG-Rochade is also scalable both in terms of the number of CIs that it can support and in terms of its relational connectivity, i.e., its ability to understand and map the complex network of relationships between CIs and the federated (citizen) CMDBs. Theoretically, ASG-Rochade can accommodate a hundred million CI types – a limit well in excess of anything yet to be approached in any real-world CMDB deployments.

Benefits in Visualization, Analysis and IntegrationASG’s MetaCMDB Viewer provides a standard facility for the visual navigation of the CMDB, allowing queries to be defined and executed to show details of CIs and the relationships between them. It presents information based on user-defined preferences including: language, graphical and textual formats, and business versus tech-nical detail. It also enables integrated views across both home-grown and packaged applications such as SAP®, PeopleSoft®, Siebel®, etc.


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ASG’s MetaCMDB’s capabilities for visualizing applica-tions, their design and behavior characteristics, and the technologies and infrastructure underneath them can bring multiple benefits. It can, for instance, support change planning and reduce the risk of business impact due to human errors, giving IT managers a resource for managing both the technical and business implications of change. ASG’s MetaCMDB supports the investiga-tion of causes, identifies the CIs associated with im-pacted business services, and compares configuration versions to understand change implications.

EMA research indicates that a major issue in many CMDB deployments is building adapters to connect core CMDB investments with incumbent manage-ment tools and other data sources. For connectivity with federated data stores as well as other data sources, ASG’s MetaCMDB uses ASG’s Unified Management Architecture (UMA) Adapters to acquire and reconcile CI Information from:

Networks – HP Openview•

Asset Managers

Service/Help Desk tools – like HP Service Desk™ and BMC Remedy™

Mainframe and distributed servers

Web and legacy applications – SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft, Siebel, leading Integrated Voice Response (IVR) packages and Web based applications like .NET and Java

Mainframe and distributed performance management tools – like IBM Omegamon and Wintel Servers via MS System Center

Systems management tools – Tivoli Enterprise Console

ASG’s adapter bus architecture can support both uni-directional and bi-directional integrations. It can also enable real-time feeds from database or SNMP input sources to the CMDB so that the necessary reconcili-ation and synchronization can be done to provide real-time insight to service performance.

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Figure 4 – How ASG’s Business Service Management Platform works


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ASG’s “Business Layer” & Real-Time MonitoringASG has also invested in a “business layer” of Business Intelligence supportive technologies that provide non-technical BI reports via eleven industry-specific, cus-tomizable dashboards, and several out-of-the-box, BSM applications including the following.

Workbench analytics: ASG’s MetaCMDB’s ability to store both “as is” and “to be” data on configura-tion items provides IT managers and developers with workbench capabilities to support the evolution of the CMDB system, along with other infrastructure changes and application service planning. This capability can allow planners and architects to evaluate specific trad-eoffs, impacts, and what/if results of specific planned changes. For example, enterprise architects planning a data center consolidation can use these capabilities to understand the impact of a proposed server consolida-tion on overall infrastructure and service performance.

Enterprise applications are complex systems that can be comprised of as much as several thousand components. These components can be built using many different technologies and can be integrated with any number of related applications. Keeping the CMDB populated with current application-related CI information and status data from targeted monitoring/surveillance systems is therefore key to a successful CMDB implementation.

ASG’s Business Service Management Solution provides a set of automated discovery, management and depen-dency mapping tools for network, systems, job schedul-ing, batch processing and application systems. The depth of discovery provided by the BSM solution is distinctive in the industry as it reaches beyond the typical asset and application discovery to look into application source code, batch processing and job scheduling.

Some of more critical areas in ASG’s discovery arsenals are:

The BSP Asset Management™ application uses SNMP discovery to locate and manage:

Wintel and UNIX® servers and workstations

Print servers and printers

OSI Layer 2 and Layer 3 network devices (hubs, routers, servers and switches)

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PCI cards and systems software are discovered via agent-based technology.

Applications discovery and dependency mapping is accomplished with ASG-becubic.

ASG-becubicASG-becubic discovers application components and their relationships and enables users to understand their scope and complexity. ASG-becubic can help to resolve both business and technical issues across the enterprise, including application integration and outsourcing, exter-nal regulatory requirements, internal control compliance, and application modernization.

ASG-becubic provides much of the detailed knowl-edge required for effective management of application lifecycle tasks including: gap analysis, application replace-ment project definition, and estimating the scope of ap-plication changes. It also can help to scope outsourcing contracts, improve application quality, identify applica-tion integration points and resolve program problems.

ASG-becubic supports in-house developed applications, running in both mainframe and distributed processing environments. In addition, ASG is working on extend-ing ASG-becubic to discover SOA artifacts. It recognizes application components constructed in over a hundred different technologies including: programming, script, control languages, teleprocessing monitors, screen generators, middleware, database management systems and schedulers. It also maintains a current view of ap-plications through unattended collection processes that interface with the ASG’s MetaCMDB and other configu-ration management tools.

Given this diversity in function and benefits, ASG-be-cubic is designed to support both business and technical users with role-based views of information at multiple levels of detail. All of the information is unconstrained by siloed data access, so many different user groups can benefit from ASG-becubic. For example:

Enterprise architects can identify legacy applications that are good candidates for migration to SOA.

Management can create a detailed inventory of the application portfolio including application size and the relationships between components.

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Maintenance staff can identify the scope and impact of any change across all of the affected applications and devices.

Developers developing new applications or integrating existing applications can search applications for common services.

Operations teams can understand information on job scheduling, dependencies, structure and flow.

Support staff can identify bugs in jobs, transactions and programs through ASG-becubic’s application structure and flow charts.

ASG-becubic’s proactive analysis goes beyond tradi-tional root cause analysis because the in-depth parsing and analysis of application source code allows ASG-becubic to answer questions about not only how ap-plications behave, but why they behave the way they do. This is a capability that is unique in the industry and one of the reasons why ASG-becubic is often used as a standalone application lifecycle management tool. ASG-becubic is also unique in its integration with ASG-Rochade, its strong visualization capabilities and the breadth of monitoring.

ASG can also provide application-to-infrastructure dependency mapping which rounds out ASG’s overall discovery offerings.

Planning a data center consolidation can use these capabilities to understand the impact of a proposed server consolidation on overall infrastructure and service performance.

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BSP Enterprise Workload Automation™ aligns IT and business performance by mapping pre-defined enterprise workload automation milestones to the business services they support. BSP Enterprise Workload Automation’s dynamic dashboard displays real-time service performance graphically to give both business and technical users insight into issues related to enterprise workloads. This in turn enables a more proactive approach to preventing service degradations and allows resource allocation decisions based on identified areas impacting service performance.

BSP Service Level Management™ provides modeling, reporting and forecasting capabilities that measure, verify and predict SLA quality over a specific period of time. Service quality is graphically represented through a variety of indicators and computing rules that model the structure of a SLA, business service, or IT service. BSP Service Level Management provides service-level intelligence by automating tasks and providing continuous monitoring throughout the reporting period.

ASG Real Time Monitoring provides the ability to monitor from the Mainframe to the desktop. ASG breadth is demonstrated by Performance Monitors for Servers, Networks and Applications. ASG can uniquely monitor all applications (both custom and packaged) and all types of infrastructure (Servers and Networks) and then dynamically provide status via its UMA adapters and bus architecture to the MetaCMDB.

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Figure 5: ASG’s service level management reporting can support executive as well as technical users


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EMA’s PerspectiveEMA has identified two overall clusters in CMDB system core capabilities. One is typically Help Desk or Service-Desk focused, more process-centric and tends to be more focused on desired or reviewed states. The second type of cluster is more operationally centric, more designed for real-time BSM, and typically stronger in discovered state. This type of cluster also typically involves the reconciliation of many different types of monitoring and data collection capabilities.

It is in this more operationally-centric CMDB cluster that ASG’s capabilities excel. This is natural as well, given ASG’s BSM focus, since while ultimately BSM re-quires both types of CMDB Systems, it is natively more rooted in operational needs. Moreover, ASG offers a distinctive capability in assessing application system behaviors that cut across both operations and service planning and lifecycle needs for application manage-ment, including application development. EMA views this combination as both powerful and distinctive with significant upside potential for enterprises seeking to integrate service creation with service delivery and ser-vice support in a BSM model.

This isn’t to say that ASG’s CMDB system isn’t designed to be all things to all people. It is focused on service impact management, and as such is strongest as an op-erational investment, rather than being targeted at man-aging the process of change, or on asset management, as is typical with many platform-centric CMDB implemen-tations. ASG also has only nascent workflow capabilities which it has acquired from content management vendor Mobius, and this aspect of its CMDB system capabilities will be getting more investment in coming months. ASG should also move to further its partnerships to complete its CMDB system vision and affirm its role as an inte-grated player in a multi-brand CMDB environment.

However, ASG’s highly evolved capabilities in analytics and visualization, and its clear architectural strengths for integrating a wide range of data sources (including multi-brand data sources), make these initial limits on its CMDB/BSM capabilities far less of an initial concern.

Perhaps the main challenge for ASG will be appropri-ate levels of visibility and marketing surrounding its CMDB/BSM deployments. Being a “sleeping giant” or a “best-kept secret” is a double-edged sword. EMA believes that the potential for ASG as a market player is huge, but that potential can only be fulfilled with more extensive investments in visibility, brand recognition in this context, and adoptions within and beyond its extensive user base that reaffirm and help to refine its CMDB/BSM vision.

About ASG | www.asg.comASG provides software solutions to over 85 percent of the world’s largest companies. Through its compre-hensive Business Service Management (BSM) solution, Business Service Platform™, ASG is an established BSM provider with a strong heritage in Content, Metadata, Applications, Operations, Performance, Infrastructure, and Identity Management technologies. ASG enables clients to reduce costs, enhance customer service, meet business objectives, and truly go beyond BSM. Founded in 1986, ASG is a privately held company based in Naples, Florida, USA, with more than 90 offices around the world.

About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.Enterprise Management Associates is an advisory and research firm providing market insight to solution providers and technology guidance to Fortune 1000 companies. The EMA team is composed of industry respected analysts who deliver strategic awareness about computing and communications infrastructure. Coupling this team of experts with an ever-expanding knowledge repository gives EMA clients an unparalleled advantage against their competition. The firm has published hundreds of articles and books on technology management topics and is frequently requested to share their observations at management forums worldwide.

This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.


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