The general release of the CA CMDB is being announced in conjunction with the recent acquisition of Cendura, a privately held 50-person Silicon Valley firm that offers the kind of application infrastructure mapping already provided by Mercury, Troux, and others.

CA promotes its CMDB offering as one that can be implemented faster, thanks to inclusion of roughly 50 device and service profiles, such as Windows or UNIX server, Cisco network device, or EMC networked storage array.

Customers can use the basic device profiles as starting points which they can modify as they configure the CMDB to their data centers. Similarly, CA’s CMDB comes with pre-built reports that customers can configure.

The Cendura acquisition, which is small enough that CA is not disclosing the purchase price, will add application mapping to infrastructure. Like Mercury’s Appilog acquisition, Cendura can automate the mapping of dependencies between applications and the underlying server, storage, network devices, and other resources that they consume.

To some extent, CA Unicenter’s existing application and network management products already perform mapping, but it is at a lower level of device discovery. Nonetheless, when the Cendura functionality is eventually integrated into CMDB, CA will include features that filter out redundant mappings that will come from it, and third-party tools.

CA promises to integrate the Cendura functionality into the core CMDB product at the next upgrade cycle, which it says will be before the end of the year. It won’t charge extra to CMDB customers for the new mapping functionality.

Although it is not disclosing plans now, CA says it will later incorporate the application mapping capability into other business service optimization (BSO) offerings. For instance, it could map well to the Clarity project portfolio management offerings, to track changes in project direction or resources.

It’s no mystery that CA is releasing the CMDB. It spoke about the upcoming CMDB offering several months ago when it rolled out ITIL compliance and jumpstart services back in June.

And, with the CMDB the starting point for ITIL adoption, it’s hard to imagine infrastructure or IT service management providers remaining serious players without one. The longer-term issue is the matter of federating CMDBs, because most IT data center tools are likely to each come with their own in future years. Last winter, BMC, Fujitsu, IBM, and HP announced preliminary work on a draft specification for CMDB federation, an effort that CA has not yet signed onto.

The CMDB seems to fall within CA’s current practice of assigning no-nonsense branding that is a 180-degree shift from its old practices of over-hyped or flowery product names such as CA Unicenter The Next Generation (TNG). For instance, the company’s current strategic direction goes under the unglamorous name of Enterprise IT Management.

In this case, though, using plain vanilla branding could be somewhat confusing. For instance, with the latest release 11 of CA’s Unicenter products, all feed their data to a Management Database, also known as MDB. Consequently, you would be excused if you thought that the new CMDB is a subset or superset of the MDB. In actuality, both are different offerings, although of course, the CMDB might use MDB as one of its data sources.