The Forrester Wave™: Application Mapping For The CMDB, Q1 2006

Forrester evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the eight vendors that have brought an original technology for automated application to infrastructure dependency mapping to market across 63 criteria. Application to infrastructure dependency mapping bridges the gap between business user value, application performance, and what the IT specialist sees — essentially, infrastructure component availability. This, combined with the ITIL CMDB concept, lays the foundation for radical changes in the way IT operations manage resources. All products performed strongly; we favored those that can produce results in real time, though this may not be everyone's choice. nLayers and Relicore emerged as the overall leaders, followed by BMC, Tideway, and Collation/IBM. In a very close race, the strong contenders are: Mercury, which continues to revamp its technology and product integration; Cendura, which offers highly detailed data-center-oriented information; and Computer Associates (CA), which is just entering the field. This order will almost certainly change considerably over the next 12 to 18 months, with HP being the next likely heavyweight entrant. Forrester will continue to analyze acquisitions and product updates in this dynamic market on an ongoing basis.