Managing a company's IT infrastructure has become more complicated in recent years. The tools at the disposal of IT managers haven't quite figured out how to work together to deal with this complexity. Instead, to understand how the infrastructure is actually supporting the business, IT managers struggle to manually assimilate a grab bag of incompatible technologies, often with unsatisfying results.

One possible approach to eliminating the chaos is the common information model (CIM), a standard designed to eliminate the issue of disparate multivendor management platforms. CIM was developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (www.dmtf.org), a trade group dedicated to the development, adoption and interoperability of management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise and Internet environments.

Though infrastructure management vendors such as Tivoli, HP and BMC are migrating their products to be compatible with the CIM standard, it could take a while for this process to play itself out. Until they do, a combination of CIM-based technology and XML offers the best approach to bringing order to enterprise-level IT infrastructure management.

The Big Picture
The pervasive role of IT infrastructure has become impossible to ignore. While system failures or slowdowns may have barely registered on a company's day-to-day operations in the past, such problems can have much greater consequences today. Internal users may end up without access to critical data, business partners could be shut out of transactions, and Web customers forced to struggle with faltering service may take their business elsewhere.

To avoid such disappointments, business unit managers expect IT to have a complete picture of how a company's IT infrastructure is delivering business services. That leaves IT managers with the unenviable task of relating information from several management domains, such as Internet connectivity, databases and applications; network, system and storage devices; and even non-IT devices like handhelds and satellite communications.

In addition, IT managers need to understand how a resource that a critical business service depends on - for example, a Web server - affects other elements of the corporate information infrastructure. Seemingly discrete, adverse events that impact an individual resource can actually ripple out into much larger corporate problems.

At the moment, however, staying abreast of the various systems feeding into an e-business engine can be a real challenge.

As things stand, individual management systems are primarily event-driven, notifying managers when specific problems occur but offering little in the way of a business context for this information, much less a means to relate information from multiple management tools.

A Long Wait?
Thankfully, this problem should begin to resolve itself once CIM standards gain wider acceptance.

When CIM-enabled management systems such as HP OpenView, Microsoft's SMS, Novell ManageWise and CA Unicenter are able to share data transparently, IT managers will find it much easier to manage a CIM-only shop as all data will be accessible through a single front end (most likely a Web browser).

CIM has some significant supporters including Microsoft, Cisco and Sun Microsystems. Microsoft, for example, has added CIM support to Windows 2000, and Sun and Cisco have kicked off initiatives rallying developers to the CIM cause.

The reality, however, is that CIM won't solve today's management problems overnight. For one thing, IT managers must cope with a heterogeneous array of management packages - some CIM-enabled, some legacy systems that don't meet CIM standards.

In addition, vendors have some incentive to hold back on the standards adoption process. While open, standards-based software may be the trend on the Internet, the majority of these vendors have made their money selling proprietary systems that sought to displace rather than coexist or integrate with other installed management tools.

It looks like it could be a long wait until the ideal of a smoothly linked, CIM-enabled management environment is realized. To keep the process of enterprise IT management integration moving, industry players need a technology that can bridge the gap between management systems.

Bridging the Gap
While management vendors work out their implementation issues, we can use XML translation to share information between infrastructure management systems.

According to GartnerGroup, a respected IT research firm, XML-defined data models are the most promising way to integrate corporate applications, including management systems.

XML's content-sensitive nature allows IT managers to pinpoint business problems, rather than simply point out infrastructure events. It's not enough to tell a business unit head that a database fault led to a crippled intranet; it's important for the IT manager to know that sales reps currently can't pull up information on cashmere sweaters.

Our flagship product, Formula, uses XML to correlate IT objects to business objects, making it possible to draw management information from both CIM-enabled and non-CIM-enabled management systems.

While we look forward to the day when infrastructure management systems are CIM-enabled, we believe XML offers an important springboard for companies seeking to integrate today. After all, when it comes to e-business, no one has time to waste.