Rob England, AKA The IT Skeptic, says CMDB can't be done. Just to get the benefit linking a change or incident in a CI to the associated service(s) for determining impact requires enormous costs.

Raul Cristian Aguirre comments on the recently released paper from Gartner, Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, which describes the state of CMDB deployments (Referring to CMDB, Raul calls them financial black holes).

Rob England explains that CMDB is not a given. CMDB has actually been inflated and over-sold to hide its complexities and justify its huge costs. CMDB really becomes an obscure niche technology of interest to a few, not a core foundation of IT operations.

Bernd Harzog explores what effect new developments like virtualization and cloud have upon the role of the CMDB. Traditional CMDBs were designed for static physical systems. The CMDB is unable to transition to the cloud-based virtualized world.

Rob England, AKA The IT Skeptic, describes why CMDB or CMS is - for most organisations - a bad idea. For example, how will you populate the CMDB initially? The vendors' silver bullet solution is auto-discovery. It can find out something about many things, but not everything about ALL things.

Rob England, AKA The IT Skeptic, announces an exclusive new forum - the Five-Percent Club. These are the 5% of companies that actually succeeded in justifying and implementing CMDB.

Joe Heck considers that thing that has become labelled as a “CMDB”, saying that for himself it isn’t. It isn’t a configuration management database. He explains that for IT, it’s just an inventory of assets – digital and physical.

Tom Kearns says that the unfortunate reality for CMDB is that many times we don't have a single CMDB and it is not always up-to-date and accurate. There are also a lot of changes happening that need be recorded in the CMDB and when changes occur, the CMDB is usually updated after-the-fact, leaving an information accuracy gap that gets repeated over and over again.

Why is the current Configuration Management Database (CMDB) ill-equipped to perform the function it was intended to? William Vambenepe says that a new approach to discovery is needed. The new reality of today's data center means new information is being created at a very rapid rate and similarly environments can change at an unprecedented pace.

Rob England, AKA The IT Skeptic, defines CMDB as "that huge IT Monument to unnecessary technology which is known to the vendors and their sucker buyers as CMDB". He describes CMDB as a complex technology with costs exceeding its real value.

Jean-Pierre Garbani, VP and Principle Researcher at Forrester, explores the roots of Business Service Management (BSM). What actually happened was that the CMDB discovery tools showed a lot of limitations, creating the imperfect CMDB.

Paul Rubens declares that creating a CMDB is no small task. He explains that for all but the smallest of organizations, creating a complete CMDB is likely to be a mammoth project whose completion will be measured in years, if ever.

Forrester researcher, Glenn O’Donnel says that the once-promising configuration management database (CMDB) has failed. The complexity and confusion surrounding the CMDB has led to many project failures, prompting I&O professionals to rethink their approach.

David Norfolk looks at how organizations should best manage their infrastructure. The IT environment is in chaos. That means that nobody is sure of exactly what IT there is or how it is configured. The CMDB becomes a white elephant sinking under the weight of its unused, and increasingly out-of-date data.

Principal Researcher and VP of Forrester Research, Jean-Pierre Garbani, looks at the original business service management (BSM) concept. As Jean-Pierre continues, the foundational technology of application mapping discovery and the configuration management database (CMDB) or configuration management system (CMS) has not yet fulfilled all of its promises.

Tobin Isenberg explores some of the common reasons that CMDB implementations fail. If the there is too much data, it makes it hard to find anything, when there is inaccurate data, no one will trust the CMDB.

Hank Marquis describes how ITIL v3 has revolutionized configuration management and redefined CMDB. He explains that the CMDB has been one of the most desired, misunderstood, over-marketed and most failure prone of all the ITIL concepts.

Charles Betz, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), compares the CMDB to the manufacturing world’s Bill of Materials. However, he points out that this comparison falls short.