This afternoon Novell announced it’s intent to acquire Managed Objects, an “independent,” if you will, BSM vendor. Managed Objects’ main trade is in CMDBs and, of late, a Web 2.0 layers on-top of CMDBs, myCMDB (see demo above and overview as well).

Novell Starting Out IT Management Portfolio Build-out

I must admit that I don’t typically think of Novell and “IT Management” in the same sentence, or even paragraph. I’ve been more enamored of Moonlight and Mono over in Novell land. Indeed, as the two said when I talked with them this morning, there’s pretty much no technology overlap. Novell has identity management, desktop management, and of course SuSE Linux. Buying into the “top” of the IT Management stack then is an interesting and novel (ho-ho) move for Novell.

I asked Novell if they had plans to open source Managed Objects, to which they said, plainly, no. They are, they said, big on open standards, protocols, and connections, per their involvement with WS-Man, Microsoft, and friends.

Whither the Blinking Lights?

Aside from signaling a general interest in fleshing out their IT Management portfolio, this also points to the need for Novell to acquire a basic monitoring and event management platform or two. Regular readers here can easily fit in the short list of people I’d come up with: Zenoss, Hyperic, Groundwork, etc. There’s always purely using Nagios and OpenNMS as well.

Coming from the other angle, people like LogLogic are interesting, esp. given the identity management “backplane” Novell likes to talk about.

Of course, Novell itself could combine with another, larger company as well.

Competition

Competitively, RedHat is doing the same IT Management portfolio build-out, though their focus is currently more virtualization than anything else. There’s, of course, the incumbent Big 4 + Microsoft, the last of which is a Novell partner in this space already. Microsoft has some interesting times ahead when it comes to System Center, Novell, Citrix, and other IT Management partners. Microsoft is still working on their delayed service desk (and the associated ITIL/MOF stuff that goes with it, read: CMDB), but once that’s out, there’ll be a certain completeness to their IT Management portfolio.

When it comes to other “indepdent” BSM vendors, there’s also Service-now.com and, as IDG’s Chris Kanaracus reminded me (see his piece), there’s also Compuware and Firescope. I would leave it to BSM aficionado Doug McClure to dump a full list on your heads, dear readers.

Of course, a portfolio build-out takes time, as HP has shown over the recent past. The important thing though, is that Novell is clearly interested in broader IT Management, which is a big change from where they’ve been.

You might remember Managed Objects myCMDB announcement from a little while ago. In my view, myCMDB is trying to provide a layer on-top of CMDBs (Managed Objects own, BMC’s, and “custom”) that pulls features from the consumer, Web 2.0 world. As you go through the overview and then demo, you can pull out that the main idea with myCMDB is to get people using the CMDB more. There are other things, of course, like reports a-plenty and activity streams.

Overview

First, Managed Object’s Dustin McNabb gives us a short overview of the state of CMDB in Managed Objects view, and then does a quick intro explaining the ideas and goals of myCMDB:

Demo

Next, Abbas Haider Ali gives us a demo of myCMDB itself. He first highlights the main page with the tag cloud, communties, and activity stream. Then we get into navigating the relationships between each of the items the CMDB tracks and look over the reporting options that myCMDB provides:

Be sure to click the fullscreen button if you’d like see a larger version of the demo, or the presentation.

(Novell purchased Managed Objects in 2008.)

Disclosure: Managed Objects is a client and sponsored this screencast.