Testimonials and Case Histories

Our organization operates across North America, with an IT division comprising over 400 professionals. We manage an extensive inventory of more than 45,000 hardware assets and over 7,000 software releases. Historically, the proliferation of disparate systems for tracking IT inventory, ranging from spreadsheets to custom databases, led to significant challenges in visibility, consistency, and operational efficiency.

Key pain points included:

• Limited understanding of the IT environment
• Difficulty assessing mission-critical systems
• Inability to identify departments impacted by outages
• Inadequate tracking of hardware lifecycle and refresh schedules

To address these issues, we prioritized the consolidation of infrastructure data and its alignment with business functions. Previous attempts using spreadsheets and custom-built databases proved unsustainable. The adoption of CMDBuild and CMDBuild READY2USE marked a turning point, enabling us to establish a centralized, scalable, and intelligent configuration management system.

Strategic Approach

CMDBuild now serves as a “Data Hub” into our IT landscape. Through a series of waterWAY connectors, we have integrated data from 10 external systems and developed custom modules to extend the capabilities of the base CMDBuild READY2USE platform.

Our guiding principles for data management within CMDBuild are:

• Data is sourced from authoritative “Sources of Truth” wherever possible
• Data is only imported if it is:
  • Accurate
  • Usable
  • Required
  • Standardized
• New functionality is added only if:
  • It does not exist elsewhere
  • It provides value through integration with existing CMDB data

Asset Management

ServiceNow remains the system of record for asset management. Key asset attributes, such as location, assignment, and status, are exported and ingested into CMDBuild via waterWAY connectors. This data is further enriched through integrations with:

• VMware vCenter: Provides cluster-level visibility, mapping virtual servers to execution clusters, hosts to served clusters, and datastores to servers.
• Flexera IT Visibility (ITV): Serves as our discovery tool for hardware and software. Devices report daily, and data is imported hourly into CMDBuild. This populates our Hardware and Software Catalogs and maps software releases to corresponding hardware.

Catalog entries include lifecycle metadata (e.g., General Availability, End of Life, Obsolescence) and ownership roles, identifying responsible managers and support teams.

Business Continuity Management (BCM)

We have developed a custom BCM module within CMDBuild to bridge business operations and supporting technologies. Each business task is assigned a Service Level Priority based on defined criteria. The CMDB stores comprehensive metadata, covering the “Who, What, Where, When” for each task, along with the associated Business Solution and its underlying technology.

This framework enables:

• Clear visibility into system criticality based on business impact
• Assessment of solution resilience and redundancy
• Informed decision-making for continuity planning

Vulnerability Management

Flexera ITV also provides vulnerability data for discovered hardware and software. This information is mapped within CMDBuild to the relevant assets, allowing us to assess risk in the context of business importance.

Summary and Outcomes

By consolidating data from multiple systems and aligning it with business functions, we have achieved a holistic view of our IT landscape. Key benefits include:

• Improved risk management: Vulnerabilities are prioritized based on business criticality.
• Proactive lifecycle management: Reports are generated to notify managers of upcoming obsolescence, supporting timely refreshes and enhanced security posture.
• Enhanced operational control: A unified, well-mapped CMDB empowers IT and business teams to collaborate effectively, especially in continuity planning and incident response.
• Advanced reporting and analytics: Inquiries and reporting are accomplished using Power BI, enabling dynamic dashboards, real-time insights, and data-driven decision-making.

The CMDBuild implementation has significantly improved our ability to understand, manage, and support our IT environment in alignment with business needs.