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Essential Steps to Evolve an Enterprise IT Infrastructure Toward Business Service Management and Support of ITIL Processes HOUSTON, April 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- BMC Software, Inc. (NYSE:BMC) today detailed the essential components organizations must include in their Configuration Management Database (CMDB) strategies. BMC Software's approach to CMDB solutions propels organizations toward organized, cost-effective management of their IT infrastructure, significantly cutting costs of IT operations while aligning IT more closely with the business. BMC Software, Business Service Management (BSM) pioneer and market leader, was the first enterprise management software vendor to release a truly federated, open CMDB that supports the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) requirement of a single, enterprise data repository to ensure data consistency and simplify integration between service management processes. A CMDB stores information about IT infrastructure components such as servers, storage devices, desktops and other computing devices, including data on their configurations. The BMC(R) Atrium(TM) CMDB manages data on IT assets, applications, business processes, people, and services -- and tracks the dynamic relationships among these components in a changing IT environment. "Change and configuration management is a foundation element of Business Service Management," said Tom Bishop, CTO at BMC Software. "Today, approximately 2,000 customers have access to BMC Atrium CMDB solutions. We have leveraged this experience and our technology leadership to provide the critical components customers need to follow to achieve the benefits of the CMDB and BSM." BMC has detailed the following requirements for achieving CMDB solution best practices: Provide a scalable and maintainable source of record for IT by utilizing a Federated Data Model. Following a federated approach, a CMDB should only store Configuration Items (CI) and their relationships within the CMDB. CIs are entities that have configurable attributes, and include more than just infrastructure components -- such as servers, desktops, and routers -- but also include logical items such as services, processes, and people. The CMDB must be able to capture both physical and logical elements of the environment as well and store and manage the relationships between these items and how they relate to business services. Other data related to CIs such as change requests, service level agreements, incidents and impact, is all data that should be stored outside of the CMDB and link to it through federation. This is the most efficient way to share configuration data without the high setup and maintenance costs associated with the pure centralized approach. Use configurable business rules and reconciliation policies to merge data into a single, reliable dataset. To ensure accurate reconciliation of configurations, a CMDB must have an efficient, repeatable mechanism to merge data from multiple discovery sources using business rules and logic to determine which data sources take precedence over others as well as how and when to merge data. In addition, the reconciliation process must provide the ability to compare the reconciled data with the CMDB, to determine if configurations discovered within the environment remain in their desired, approved states. If configurations change unexpectedly through unplanned changes, the reconciliation process workflow will notify users or trigger events to start a process of determining what changed without approval. Provide IT process users with a graphical interface to visualize the federated CMDB environment. While the CMDB provides the capabilities to store and manage information within the IT infrastructure, the true value of a CMDB lies with the ability of IT process users to leverage gathered data in a meaningful way. To address this, a CMDB must provide a graphical interface that allows users to search for and view CIs and their relationships, and instantly link to federated data stored in external repositories. Focus on integrations and the surrounding eco-system. A CMDB is only as valuable as the eco-system that integrates with the solution. With this known, organizations must recognize the importance of out-of-the-box solutions that integrate with a CMDB, such as service desk, asset management and change management. A CMDB based on a specific technology, such as application mapping, will be less effective when tracking the dynamic relationships among IT components. About BMC Software BMC Software, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage IT from a business perspective. Delivering Business Service Management, BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, database and service management. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2005 revenues of more than $1.46 billion. For more information, visit http://www.bmc.com/ . BMC Software, the BMC Software logos, and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks belong to their respective companies. http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20011003/BMCLOGO http://photoarchive.ap.org/ DATASOURCE: BMC Software, Inc. CONTACT: Tamara Doney of BMC Software, Inc., +1-916-645-6233, or +1-916-223-1668, or ; or Nathan Michel of Porter Novelli, +1-617-897-8244, or , for BMC Software, Inc. Web site: http://www.bmc.com/

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