CA and IBM, two of the so-called Big Four in systems management software, announced this week a federated configuration management database (CMDB) system for interoperability of their software. Something like this comoing from two of Big Four (BMC, CA, HP and IBM) wouldn’t normally hold much meaning for open source players such as GroundWork, Hyperic and Zenoss, but it actually does for a couple of reasons.

First, part of the technology that CA and IBM are using to link up their systems management software, which allows it to share information between the two CMDBs, is actually open source software itself from the Eclipse Cosmos Project. CA and IBM said the Eclipse Cosmos software accelerated implementation of the CMDB Federation (CMDBf) specification and the two vendors plan to contribute code from their interoperability work back to COSMOS as reference code.

Second, we’ve been hearing from both open source and proprietary players that most mid-size and large enterprise systems management users rely on more than one vendor or suite to keep tabs on their servers, networks and applications. That trend seems to be continuing and all indications are that more and more open source systems management and monitoring software is sitting alongside the traditional, proprietary suites of the Big Four. In our report, CAOS 4 Managing in the Open, we we wrote about the significance of the open source players and others integrating with the entrenched, larger vendors.

It makes sense for the open source vendors to integrate and interoperate with the systems management suites from the Big Four of BMC, CA, HP and IBM, which makes developmental, divisional or trial use much easier. Why would these entrenched vendors want to integrate with other third-party monitoring and management products? Because customers are demanding it. Think about it, are CA or IBM better off with a continued strategy that says, ‘all us, only us or nothing’ or an approach that takes into account the reality of customer choice, which has broadened thanks to open source, SaaS offerings and other factors? Regardless of how deliberately the Big Four are integrating with open source and other components, customers are using different suites, both proprietary and open source, in combination. This is also helped by the use of open standards by both the open source companies and the traditional vendors.

This is good news for the open source vendors and even better news for customers that no longer have to choose between products that are too expensive and full of feature overkill, or assemblies of smaller, less expensive tools (including open source) that have often lacked commercial backing and require greater expertise to deploy. Now customers, who have commercial open source options, can use combinations of both, reinforcing the larger, ongoing trend of more open source and proprietary software used together in the enterprise.