IT departments are also increasingly implementing established quality control and best practices frameworks such as ITIL (Information
Technology Infrastructure Library) for IT service management and operations; CobiT (Control Objectives for Information and
Related Technology), a set of guidelines for auditing IT processes and controls; and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration)
for software development. Asset management vendors have noticed and designed their packages to fit in nicely with ITIL.
Asset management provides one of the key building blocks for running IT as a business: a thorough, accurate knowledge of your
IT assets and resources. Asset management suites from companies such as BMC, Computer Associates, LANDesk, MRO Software, Novell,
Peregrine Systems, and others have extensive discovery and inventorying capabilities that gather detailed information on a
company's PCs, notebooks, peripherals, and network equipment, including components, operating systems, software, configuration
and identification information, location, and personal settings. Many come with both agentless and agent-based discovery and
inventory capabilities: The agentless module finds everything on the network, and then, if your security policy allows, the
agents go out and report back more detailed information.
Inventory data is continually updated to keep up with changes and upgrades, and all the data is stored in a single central
data repository that can also be used for generating analyses and integrating with other corporate applications such as ERP.
BMC, Peregrine, and other vendors actually use a database that conforms to ITIL's CMDB (configuration management database)
specs and use the same data for their asset management and service management/help desk solutions. "One of the first requirements
of ITIL is to have one single central source of the truth," says Dave Wilt, senior solutions marketing manager at BMC.
Most asset management packages have workable discovery engines, but context and relationship awareness is what separates the
men from the boys. "The way you buy software is obviously not the same as the way it is discovered on the network," says Allan
Andersen, director of Unicenter product management at CA. "You may deploy lots of different versions of the same software
or several packages as a suite. You want a solution that is good at linking the licensable entity with the discovered entity."
There's also the question of relationships. "Ideally the solution should be able to tell you that this database on this server
and that other server and these two application servers are all related to this one module of Siebel, so you can see assets
and components as parts of a business service," BMC's Wilt says. "That way if server A is running low on memory, I know right
away that it runs a piece of software that's vital to my order-entry service." BMC's Atrium CMDB stores more than 80 different
relationship types. Many packages also have reconciliation engines that compare and reconcile data from several different
discovery engines.
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