Brian Emerson - No Data is an Island

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IT seems to be the quintessential land of buzzwords, and now there is a new one: Configuration Management. What is it? Why should you care about it? TalkBMC asked BMC's Brian Emerson whether or not he could help explain this new term. And he did explain it, in terms that would make sense to both the IT operations side and the business side.

Says Emerson, configuration management is a hot term in the marketplace right now. The term arises from ITIL -- the IT Infrastructure Library -- that more and more IT shops are using to establish best practices for their operation and to find consistent ways of running IT processes. According to ITIL, a configuration management database (CMDB) captures not only information about your IT shop's assets (e.g., servers, desktops), but also about the relationships between these assets and the relationships these assets have with your company's business processes. So what if one server experiences downtime? Well, what if that server is related to your company's order taking process -- downtime for that asset hurts!

Getting The Big Picture of your IT infrastructure is not easy, given all the various silos of data that accumulate in any business. But that picture becomes a lot clearer using a CMDB, and this improved view can help you make better business decisions, based on what is best for the business, not just for IT. Today, IT cannot be an island apart from the business it supports. Viewing IT's assets in their business context adds value to the organization and value to the business.

Resources

Service Impact Manager

Service Impact and Event Management solution

Bio

Brian Emerson is a solutions marketing manager for BMC Software solutions focused on enabling technologies, including the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Brian joined BMC in July 2000; previously, he worked as a product manager in the AR System Product Management at BMC Remedy. He has a bachelors degree in Operational Management and Information Systems from Santa Clara University.

Production Credits

Ynema Mangum, Producer
Dana Farver, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager

If you're interested in contributing to TalkBMC or you have an idea for a topic, please contact Ynema Mangum at talkbmc@bmc.com.