The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is the foundation stone of service support and delivery operations. It is accessed and populated by all service processes to contain information relating to and necessary to deliver effective service management. The RMS Service Management Suite incorporates a powerful CMDB product that has been continually developed and enhanced since its introduction in the late 1980's.
The RMS Configuration Management Database is a relational database populated to hold all information pertaining to the Service Support and Delivery processes. Typical Configuration Items (CIs) held would include customer details, users, privileges, assets and inventory items, contracts, SLAs/OLAs, known errors, knowledge, incidents, problems etc. The interdependencies and relationships between the CIs can be configured, for example; to create service infrastructures, groups or resource pools.
RMS' development strategy has been to provide out of the box solutions to reduce implementation and data import costs, deliver quick return on investment and minimise the ongoing cost of ownership. The RMS CMDB comes with a pre-defined layout and field-set but is configurable by customers using the GUI driven toolsets provided as part of the suite. This flexible solution approach delivers immediate results with the option to expand and a low cost of ownership. Population of information, once configured, is a matter of filling in the spaces.
A core feature of the RMS CMDB and its integration with the Service Management Suite, that separates us from our competitors, is the ability to record all information and deliver access to the user at each key stage within an application or process.
The aim for every ITIL implementation is to achieve an up-to-date, precise Configuration Management Database (CMDB) from which all of the ITIL processes can be developed, aided and managed.
The reality of doing this is often not as simple as just creating a database with all of this information within it. The issue is that the process of gathering the information can be very intensive and without the ability to keep the information accurate, the information can quickly become out-of-date.
To resolve this issue the Service Management thought process has turned to a new type of CMDB model; the federated CMDB. The federated CMDB is updated via integrations which take data from asset discovery tools, network management tools, HR databases and Contracts databases to name just a few. Using this information and pulling this together into one federated view for the CMDB, reduces the implementation time and the complexity of the whole project. It increases the scalability allowing you to manage your CMDB in bite size chunks and reduces the overheads on maintaining the CMDB.
The hierarchical structure and inbuilt flexibility and robustness of the product, which is database independent, has been a core reason behind the company's success within the professional ‘service provider' market, who have to accommodate many different organisations.
