Business Service Management (BSM) is a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT. BSM offers a way to bring together many disparate processes and tools to create quantifiable improvement in efficiency and the ability to view technology as it applies to business process. BSM enables your IT department to:

• Operate by service rather than by individual configuration items or technology.
• Prioritize your efforts, improving the service that you deliver to your business.
• Understand and predict how technology impacts your business and your business impacts the IT infrastructure.
  

BMC Software delivers a BSM solution according to the key functions of an IT organization:

• Planning – Capture and track information related to demand, supply, resources, finances, and risk.
• Support – Reduce complexity, integrate customer support, change management, and asset management, and increase their efficiency.
• Operations – Find and fix problems before your users do with analytics, event automation, and performance management. Automate repetitive, manual tasks to eliminate errors and get things done more quickly.

The IT Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®) defines standards for the processes that IT departments use to manage IT hardware and software, such as problem management, incident management, and change management. These processes ensure the availability of the critical IT services that sustain a business, like banking systems, ordering systems, and manufacturing systems.

Additionally, ITIL configuration management needs reliable data about components in the IT environment and needs to understand the impact to key business services when there are changes to that environment. For a large company, maintaining information about thousands of pieces of hardware and software is difficult to manage. Central to these ITIL processes is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The data in the CMDB feeds the related applications that perform ITIL processes.

As an enabler to ITIL Configuration Management, BMC Atrium Discovery automates the process of populating CMDB by exploring IT systems to identify hardware and software, and then creating CIs and relationships from the discovered data. With BMC Atrium Discovery, the Configuration Manager is able to

• Dramatically decrease CMDB population times, which accelerates the implementation of BSM and the applications that perform ITIL Service Operations processes.
• Increase data accuracy by automatically and continuously updating configuration data in the CMDB.
• Identify the IT components that comprise enterprise applications and business services.