IBM’s latest product set is designed to automate IT process workflows for change, availability, storage and release management and are each modeled on the best practices of ITIL and IBM’s own expertise in change management, said Norman Wilkinson of IBM’s Software Group. It’s the first time we will have a CMDB to market, and there is a now a firm roadmap of products to support it.

But unlike its rivals in this segment, which typically focus on the service desk and issues that relate to incident and problem management as a lead into ITIL, IBM views the change management process as the surest focal point.

Other vendors are primarily service-desk oriented. That’s not the only strategy to take, said Wilkinson. It can result in a limited data store that ony supports the service desk. A full-featured CMDB will support much broader IT service management process improvements.

Its stance is in part explained by that fact that rivals like BMC Software, CA, and Hewlett-Packard each has a service-desk product, whereas IBM relies on third parties for that function. Some market watchers maintain that IBM made a huge mistake when Tivoli sold its service-desk capability to Peregrine in the 1990s, and which has since been acquired by HP.

Until now, IBM has only been able to talk about the CMDB, while the likes of HP, CA, BMC, along with Managed Objects have all long been actively marketing one.

The service management market is starting to heat up, with all of the main vendors having made announcements in the last month or so.

BMC’s Atrium CMDB has been bundled into its asset and service managements products, and the vendor is now looking to add support of CMDB to its Patrol remote monitoring products.

CA has announced it is making available its MDB change and configuration management system as a standalone product, because it is the cornerstone of ITIL adoption.

In CMDB360 degrees, Managed Objects has one of the very few products in the market to combine all the capabilities needed for CMDB deployment, namely reconciliation, federation, mapping and visualization, and synchronization.

HP, meanwhile, says it has offered a CMDB with its OpenView Service Desk software since 1999. Todd deLaughter, VP and general manager of the company’s OpenView Business Unit, said that the integration work just completed to tie Peregrine’s AssetCenter into HP OpenView Service Desk represents a foundation of its new Active CMDB strategy.

It means we can offer full end to end lifecycle management, from automated discovery and logging of assets to the financial management of IT, chargeback and asset procurement, he said.

deLaughter also said the HP system provided some powerful service abstraction features. We can start to provision users according to a service and according to their role, rather than having provision them one by one by server, by application or by database. We can look at transaction performance from the user perspective to measure the full experience, and then drill down to do root cause analysis.

The IBM release is made up of Tivoli Availability Process Manager, which correlates the impacts of outages on the business and, when an outage occurs, identifies failing components by automatically launching diagnostic tools. Also included is Tivoli Release Process Manager, which provides a higher level of automation for deployment of software releases, patches, and upgrades. It supplements Tivoli’s automated software distribution with workflows and impact analyses of deploying new software.

Finally, the Tivoli Storage Process Manager tools provide workflows for discovering storage resources and supporting workflows for correlating storage requirements to available infrastructure. They all become available June 30.

IBM says its roadmap includes as key milestones several more Process Manager releases that will address all 10 core ITIL processes, plus the one it has announced for storage management, which although not normally included in ITIL prescriptions lends itself to process management automation.

Slated for the second half of the year, said Wilkinson, are additional Process Manager tools for automated capacity management, with the remainder to be specified in 2007.