Management heavyweights are tackling customer IT service management concerns with product advances that could deliver on the promise of intelligent and automated data centers.

BMC Software and HP are touting new products they say will help network managers take inventory of IT assets, maintain up-to-date configuration databases and automatically track changes that could affect service levels.

BMC this week is scheduled to unveil IT Discovery Suite, which includes software gained through its acquisition of Marimba. HP last week introduced OpenView Automation Manager, incorporating technology acquired from Consera and Novadigm. Automation Manager lets network managers build models for IT components and automatically maintain them, HP says.

The new products are expected to help customers cut costs through automation, remain compliant with regulatory requirements and keep distributed IT components working toward the goal of supporting business-critical applications.

Dubbed change and configuration management (CCM), such software has a twofold purpose. On the configuration side, it identifies, records, tracks and reports on IT assets such as applications, servers, switches and firewalls. On the change side, the software ensures all changes made to IT components "are carried out in a planned and authorized manner," analyst Jean-Pierre Garbani says in a Forrester Research report.

CCM software includes a centralized management console and database repository, which gets updated from information gathered across a network either through distributed software agents or scheduled scans on servers and devices. Ideally, the software lets customers identify when configuration changes will cause a service disruption.

"Without being able to measure the impact of changes made, I can't be sure what business applications or users are being affected by a performance problem, and that's bad customer service," says Todd Scharrad, manager of client services for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority in Canada. Scharrad uses a combination of FrontRange's Heat service management software and HP OpenView products to automate change detection and incident management across 6,000 IT assets. He plans to roll out a complete configuration process with FrontRange products by July because, he says, CCM underpin larger IT objectives in his department.

"If a system can tell me what users will be impacted when I bring down a file cluster or when a switch fails, I can plan my IT tasks around what's critical to the business," he says.

Until recently, management giants BMC, Computer Associates, HP and IBM were relatively quiet on the CCM front. Vendors such as Cendura, Collation, mValent, Relicore and Troux made the first inroads with customers. Many of these smaller companies gained traction with customers despite the down economy because their software helps reduce manual labor and can improve IT service performance by fine-tuning applications.

The software lets IT managers see the logical and physical dependencies among applications, servers and devices, experts say.

"If you want to manage an IT service, you need to first define what it's made up of, how it's configured," says Glenn O'Donnell, program director at Meta Group. "CCM provides the underlying nuts and bolts you need to define IT services."

IT service management vendor FrontRange in the next few weeks is scheduled to release Heat ITSM 5.0, featuring new software add-ons that help customers incorporate CCM processes into their service management systems.