CA and IBM on Monday demonstrated interoperability between their respective configuration management databases, which are repositories for information related to all the components of an information system.

The integration is the first public demonstration based on the CMDB Federation specification authored by BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft, according to CA and IBM. The specification is under development as a standard by the Distributed Management Task Force.

The interoperability was shown at the itSMF Fusion service management conference in San Francisco. The demonstration shows that companies can link data sources and asset information in a heterogeneous environment to simplify IT service management.

"Businesses recognize that reducing the complexity in managing their multi-vendor IT environments can help them save money, ease operations, and enable other IT initiatives for improved service management," Brian Bell, senior VP and general manager of service management at CA, said in a statement.

In integrating the systems, CA and IBM used open-source software from the Eclipse COSMOS project, which is building an extensible, standards-based framework for software developers to create interoperable tools for system management. CA and IBM plan to contribute code from the demonstration project to the COSMOS group at reference code.

The demonstration simulates a post-corporate merger where IT infrastructures are managed by CA's CMDB tools and the other with IBM's. The demo shows two-way federation, dynamic updates, and topology changes after federation and on-demand retrieval of the federated detailed resource data.

CMDB software is designed to help businesses unify service- and infrastructure-management tools to promote database management consistency and simplified integration among processes.