OpTier Eliminates High Cost of Configuration Management Database Projects with Automation

NEW YORK, Sept. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- OpTier®, the leader in Business Transaction Management (BTM) for the enterprise, today announced the availability of OpTier BTM™ for Configuration Management Database (CMDB)/Configuration Management Systems (CMS), providing IT management with an approach to dramatically reduce costs by ongoing detection, discovery of transaction components, and dynamically maintaining the CMDB/CMS while achieving faster return.

While the goal of the CMDB/CMS is to drive better IT management decisions, there have been proven challenges in managing and maintaining these projects, resulting in abandonment and failure in some cases.

"Early implementations [of CMDB/CMS] were focused on loading as many configuration items (CIs) and their attributes as possible into the CMDB," said Ronni Colville, VP distinguished analyst, Gartner, in the July 2010 research note "Research Roundup: How to Handle New CMDB Implementations." "When the companies realized the data was no longer a valid representation of a system, component or IT service, it became apparent that they had to start over."

OpTier BTM avoids CMDB/CMS project failure by starting with critical business transactions and end-user experience. By populating the CMDB/CMS automatically and accurately with data that is tied to critical business transactions and services, IT is given a business-centric CMDB/CMS from the start. Running 24/7 in production and collecting data from all transactions that flow through every application tier, OpTier's real-time living topology automatically updates the CMDB/CMS as changes occur in the infrastructure. This ensures the data is always valid and up-to-date.

OpTier customers have gained the following value from their CMDB/CMS projects with BTM:

• OpTier's living topology provides automatic and dynamic modeling without requiring manual mapping to business services.
• Enables a true top-down approach to managing IT services by starting with critical business transactions first.
• Allows IT managers to better prioritize problem resolution resources (e.g. impact on business transactions, cost of transactions, SLAs, processes, end-user experience, geographic locations).
• Provides change and configuration management stakeholders critical information for planning and execution of changes, analyze change-impact, helping to schedule downtime and avoid costly disruptions to the business.

"As IT practitioners give CMDB initiatives a second chance, it's important that they consider the approach rather than focusing only on the product implementation," said Linh Ho, director of product marketing at OpTier and co-author of the itSMF – IT Service Management Forum book, IT Service Management – Global Best Practices. "An automated business transaction approach that removes any manual modeling takes out the headaches and high costs of such projects."

OpTier BTM for ITIL CMDB/CMS is available now. For more information please visit: http://www.optier.com/cmdb_cms.aspx.

To listen to a webcast about the challenges of CMDB/CMS and how BTM can help click here: http://go.optier.com/CMDB-CMS-SKMS-WhatstheProblem.html.

About OpTier

Of the billions of business transactions conducted every second, more are assured by OpTier than by any other IT management software company.

OpTier's Business Transaction Management solution (OpTier BTM™) enables business application owners to take control over service performance and availability. OpTier BTM assures the quick and successful execution of all business transactions, by managing every step of every transaction. It delivers unparalleled visibility of all business transactions in order to eliminate outages, effectively manage change and improve end-user experience. OpTier, with a fast-growing list of Global 2000 customers, pioneered the concept that transactions are where IT and business meet.

SOURCE OpTier