federation

The CMDB Federation was formed in April 2006 by CMDB vendors so they could tell people they were moving towards a common standard of interoperability, known in the CMDB world as "federation", so the group is called the Federation. Two years later what have we got to show? Glacial advance. That's the way the vendors want it.

The CMDB Federation has released "version 0.95" draft specification of the standard for federation (read: interoperability) between CMDBs and similar operational software. This specification will make quite an impact on the IT operations software market once it is finished... but it isn't yet, not by a long way.

For those of you who have been losing sleep over it, latests news on the CMDB Federation has it inching towards a standard for CMDB federation. [Go on, click the Federation link: kinda says it all really]. According to one HP developer's blog, the group has moved beyond UML to XML and are now coding in preparation for an "interop" when they will test their tools together. They should sell tickets. I for one would pay to see BMC, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft all discussing who is out of synch if it doesn't work.