First Multi-Vendor IT Management Data (CMDB) Release

The CMDB Federation (CMDBf) working group has announced it has published it first release of an industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other management data repositories (MDRs), such as asset management systems and service desks.

The CMDBf was founded in April 2006, and today consists of industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu Limited, HP, IBM and Microsoft.  Their goal was to create a universal specification for federating and accessing multi-vendor data.   This first release should provide insight into how neutral this specification will truly be...as other multi-vendor technology specifications have a mixed record on their independence and the true value delivered to the marketplace.   Let's hope that this first release is the beginning of  a truly federated CMDB as it would provide great benefit and utility to many enterprises.

IBM And Microsoft Continue To battle Over SOA Standard

The battle continues between Microsoft and IBM over the right open standard approach to service-oriented architectures (SOA).  This article from CNET discusses the continuing struggle to agree on a open SOA format.  Both Microsoft and IBM are major players in ECMA, each one supports a different format, IBM  favors OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO-certified, open-source standard. While Microsoft favors Office Open XML (OOXML), which was originally developed in-house at Microsoft.  Hopefully they will find  acompromise that will provide a open approach to SOA.  The interoperability would be a great boon to numerous vendors and enterprises going forward.  Doesn't it seem like we have been here before.  :)