Enterprises have invested significant amounts of money and time in ensuring that their IT tools can meet the level of demand required to support business services, and therefore, it is unrealistic for them to simply replace their existing tools to gain the advantages of tight integration. So how can your IT organization gain value within this type of IT environment? The answer lies in your ability to leverage shared technologies that, when used with both new and existing management solutions deployed in your IT environment, can create a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing IT. By implementing a shared set of technologies based on industry standards and best practices, you benefit from a more cohesive and manageable foundation to support business needs and optimize your existing IT investments — without the need for a “rip and replace” IT strategy.

BMC provides such capabilities with BMC® AtriumTM, an open-architected set of enabling technologies that provide information sharing and process collaboration across BMC and third-party solutions. BMC Atrium provides an award-winning configuration management database (CMDB), unified service model, and common reporting interfaces to accelerate attainment of BSM. This shared set of loosely-coupled, enabling technolo-gies provides tighter integration across the tools that make up your IT environment, saving your IT organization time and money.

Enabling Collaboration among IT Processes To achieve a unified approach to managing your IT environment, you first must focus on gaining control of the data that makes IT run, and then must understand how that data supports business service availability. When your IT organization is forced to rely on siloed views of IT infrastructure components, the result is a fragmented approach to IT management that does not provide a comprehensive, complete, and accurate view of the IT environment and its relation to the business services IT supports.

On the other hand, if all IT management processes have this information at their disposal — and can both access and use it, as well as update and contribute to it — then the processes can be unified in their approach and objectives. To enable this, BMC Atrium provides two components that are architectural linchpins in linking IT processes through information sharing: the BMC® AtriumTM Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and its associated Service Model.

The BMC Atrium CMDB — Enabling the Core of Your InfrastructureThe BMC Atrium CMDB is an intelligent data repository that provides a working model of your enterprise IT infrastructure. With the BMC Atrium CMDB, you are able to define and store information on all configuration items (CIs) and relationships within the IT environment, including those that reside on third-party technologies.

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Enterprise IT organizations rely on a large array of tools to support the needs of their businesses. These tools often come from multiple vendors, and as a result, IT is faced with a variety of interfaces, datasets, and consoles. In most cases, these disparate tools do not integrate effectively, leading to gaps in information and control, and ultimately, to infrastructure fragmentation. To provide the tight integration of IT management processes and realize the benefits of Business Service Management (BSM), it is necessary to link this collection of tools and technologies in a cohesive and controlled manner.

BMC® AtriumTM enables a unified approach to IT management by addressing the following two key requirements:> Linking IT processes together through a common

repository with graphical, business-relevant views

> Improving business views into IT management and performance metrics

By consolidating disparate datasets within an organi-zation, the BMC Atrium CMDB provides a “single source of truth” for your IT management tools. This ensures a consistent approach to maintaining IT processes, such as incident, problem, change, con-figuration, asset, and service impact management. These types of applications — combined with a centralized CMDB — provide the best-practice process structure and control specified by key industry standards, such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL®). Implementing an IT management strategy supported by the BMC Atrium CMDB will allow you to gain the IT control needed to support your organization’s business goals.

The BMC Atrium CMDB provides a Common Data Model (CDM) based on industry the standards, such as Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Common Information Model (CIM) and Managed Object Format (MOF). This means that your IT configuration data will not only be managed within a single environ-ment, but that you will be conforming to a set of best practices that will support future growth across IT. The BMC Atrium CMDB includes a patent-pending Reconciliation Engine to ensure you have a single consolidated view across your environment. Finally, rather than requiring the migration of large amounts of data — and imposing the requirements of maintain-ing a monolithic data repository — the BMC Atrium CMDB provides a single, logical data store that can reside on multiple data sources throughout your IT

organization. Combined with open interfaces that integrate your existing IT tools, the BMC Atrium CMDB is the core enabling technology that provides your organization with a complete and comprehensive view of all the elements and configurations that make up the IT infrastructure.

Service Model — Linking IT and the Business While the BMC Atrium CMDB maintains a single view into your IT environment, the Service Model allows the CMDB to maintain mappings between CIs and the business services they support. Without this type of service model, your IT resources — both personnel and tools — remain disconnected from the business goals and requirements that IT is there to support. How does a server going down affect your manufactur-ing process? How will this hardware upgrade impact resources that rely on its availability? The BMC Atrium CMDB Service Model answers these types of ques-tions, and helps you create an IT infrastructure where the links between business services and their IT underpinnings are clear and well defined.

Enabling a Single, Graphical View into the IT InfrastructureIn order for the BMC Atrium CMDB and its Service Model to be valuable to your organization, IT process users who require access to CMDB data need to be able to view CI and relationship data in a meaningful and reliable way. The BMC Atrium CMDB provides a CI Browser and graphical CI Relationship Viewer that

There is a key set of information about the IT environment that all IT processes must share and use as a basis for the activities they perform to achieve the objectives of BSM. This shared information must provide the following: > Complete and accurate inventory of all elements

that make up the IT environment

> Mapping of all configuration relationships in the IT infrastructure

> Model of the dependencies between business services and the IT environment

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allow any IT process users to launch a view into the BMC Atrium CMDB to quickly see CI and relationship data relevant to their needs. The CI Browser provides a search interface for any IT process user to search for CI data stored within the BMC Atrium CMDB, while the CI Relationship Viewer allows IT process users to view the CI, as well as the relationships and depen-dencies that CI has with other CIs stored within the BMC Atrium CMDB.

In addition, the CI Relationship Viewer provides “Launch in Context” workflow capabilities, providing IT process users with a “right click” interface that allows the launching of federated data related to any CI stored with the BMC Atrium CMDB. This means that no matter where the data resides in an IT environment, the BMC Atrium CMDB provides the central access point to manage and maintain a federated CMDB environment.

Improving IT Management ControlEstablishing a common data repository and a way to relate your IT configuration items to business services provides the foundation for creating a more manage-able IT environment. However, in addition to these core enabling technologies, it’s also imperative to provide your IT staff and managers with a consistent

and informed way to interact with your IT tools, app-lications, and related data. This ensures high productivity and calculated decision-making amongst employees involved in supporting your IT processes — and gives them the means to maintain business service availability across the organization.

With these key capabilities at your disposal, you are empowered to manage across the IT environment. To enable this improved IT management control, BMC Software provides BMC® AtriumTM View.

BMC Atrium View — Powering Informed Decision-MakingTo ensure your IT staff is able to respond to business needs that affect multiple IT process areas, you must provide them with a consistent interaction model for the tools that support these processes. By providing a common set of dashboards and views for the different groups that make up IT, you enable your IT staff to better manage and support your IT infrastructure. For example, it will be easier for your staff to under-stand where to go to perform tasks; new staff can get quickly up-to-speed on IT interfaces; and newly implemented IT solutions can be linked into your existing environment.

BMC Atrium View ensures that your BSM solutions provide a common way for IT staff and management to interface with your IT environment. Today, BMC solutions provide common dashboard views and interfaces across closely related IT disciplines. For example, BMC solutions for service support utilize shared navigation and interaction paradigms to provide a consolidated set of dashboards, while BMC solutions for service delivery also provide a common view into IT operations and business services through an integrated management portal. By delivering out of-the-box interfaces for a variety of BMC products, BMC Atrium View provides a standards-based approach for creating consolidated IT management views.

In addition, BMC Atrium View technologies aggregate information across process areas by linking multiple IT data sources and applications to create a consoli-dated set of data to drive IT reporting. By working to create a unified view into data from BMC tools and applications, as well as from third-party data sources, BMC Atrium View provides a comprehensive way to manage, monitor, and understand how IT is performing.

To enable IT staff to manage across process areas and make decisions that take multiple data points into account, the following capa-bilities are necessary: > Collation of information into centralized manage-

ment dashboards to provide managers with access to overview snapshots of the status of the IT environment

> In-depth and context-rich information about the IT environment to support informed decision-making

And more importantly, this knowledge allows your organization as a whole to more effectively respond to business change and ensure that IT changes are controlled, calculated, and based on reliable information.

Enabling an Open and Flexible IT Architecture One of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations is fragmentation resulting from disconnected tools that cannot interact with each other. While BMC Atrium enabling technologies provide key architectural ele-ments for unifying the IT environment, there is also a need for a broader set of technologies to address this fragmentation. Solving this problem requires a vendor-neutral and standards-based way of linking solutions together to produce an infrastructure that is both integrated and robust, but still flexible enough to be able to change and adapt over time.

Enhancing Your BSM Solutions from BMC BMC Atrium enables your organization to benefit from the investments you have already made in IT solutions, spanning both BMC products and your existing third-party tools. BMC Atrium is available now, and ships with several BMC solutions, allowing them to utilize its enabling technologies to enhance and complement the overall value of the solutions. As new versions of BMC products become available, they will continue to integrate with the latest BMC Atrium capabilities, helping you to create a more cohesive IT infrastructure in a well controlled and incremental manner. Implementing BMC Atrium as part of your broader IT strategy will provide the means to grow your IT management capabilities and accelerate the attainment of BSM.

About BMC SoftwareBMC Software helps IT organizations drive greater business value through better management of technology. Our industry-leading Business Service Management solutions ensure that everything IT does is prioritized according to business impact, so IT can proactively address business requirements to lower costs, drive revenue, and mitigate risk. BMC solutions share BMC AtriumTM technologies to enable IT to manage across the complexity of diverse systems and processes — from mainframe to distributed, databases to applications, service to security. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and fiscal 2005 revenues of more than $1.46 billion. BMC Software. Activate your business with the power of IT. For more information, visit www.bmc.com.

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To learn more about how BMC can help activate your business, visit www.bmc.com or call 800.841.2031.

BMC Software, the BMC Software logos, and all other BMC Software product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of BMC Software, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies. © 2006 BMC Software, Inc. All rights reserved. 62192

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