CA has recently joined a working group that is creating a new interoperability specification that will ultimately enable customers to federate and access information from their complex, multi-vendor IT infrastructures, the company said today. Other founding members include BMC Software, Fujitsu, HP and IBM.

The working group will develop an open, industry-wide specification for sharing information between Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) and other data repositories. This specification will be submitted to an industry standards organization later this year. As a multi-vendor specification, it will provide companies with greater choice and flexibility in adding new hardware, applications, and middleware.

"CMDBs have become one of central elements of enterprise IT management, so a standards-based approach to this critical functionality is necessary and valuable," said Helge Scheil, Chief Architect, Business Service Optimization business unit at CA.

"IBM recognizes that open standards for IT management are important to customers and to the industry as a whole, and we welcome CA to this effort as a founding member," said Ric Telford, vice president, IBM Tivoli software. "Standardizing a way for CMDBs to interoperate is a critical part of helping companies better understand and manage their complex IT environments."

An industry standard for federating and accessing IT information will integrate communication between CMDBs, which hold all details related to the components of an IT infrastructure, including information about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data. 

With a standard way for vendors and tools to share and access configuration data, organizations can use their CMDBs to create a more complete and accurate view of IT information spread out across multiple data sources.

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