The configuration management database as a concept has companies considering new staff positions and management vendors adding tools to their product suites thanks to ITIL.

A few vendors such as BMC, HP and Managed Objects have made configuration management database technology an integral part of their larger technology portfolios. CA and IBM, in particular, this week announced a partnership that would take CMDB tools a step further by enabling data sharing between the two management heavyweight's respective products. The two plan to demonstrate the capabilities this week at the itSMF Fusion '08 conference in San Francisco.

CA and IBM say in a joint press release that they can successfully "share information between their respective CMDBs and management data repositories (MDR), such as asset management systems and service desk solutions." This capability would enable the creation of a federated CMDB. According to the press release: "This CMDB Federation demonstration shows businesses they can successfully link data sources and asset information in a multi-vendor environment to simplify IT service management initiatives."

Federated CMDBs let customers collect data from multiple sources without having to store all the data in a single, monolithic database. In the federated scenario, configuration data can reside in multiple sources and one centralized data sources is programmed to know where data related to specific assets resides. That way, IT managers don't have to become overwhelmed with the maintenance of one large data repository of data, industry watchers say.

"The demonstration is hugely important in that customers will be able to modularly integrate management tools in a way that works without huge overhead and customers work," says Dennis Drogseth, research vice president at Enterprise Management Associates. "Today in 2008 integrations among multi-vendor management products are being done that were not possible even two or three years ago."

The news comes following last year's establishment of the CMDB Federation working group, which had the management vendors teaming with companies such as Fujitsu and Microsoft to draft a specification designed to provide standard ways for data sharing among multiple configuration products. The specification has been submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force for development as a standard.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.