The Quotes by industry experts and analysts provide compelling reasons for the adoption of Application Mapping and CMDB technology in IT Departments:

General Quotes Relating to the technology
Business Service Management
IT Architecture
ITIL
nLayers Specific

General

"When you think about it, understanding interrelationships and dependencies is core to human intelligence, but something that has been sorely lacking in IT management. Each silo - network, system, application, service - has been managed in isolation, but in order to move to an on-demand autonomic model, IT management needs to automate the mapping of application/service to infrastructure dependencies and keep them updated on a continuous, real-time basis. From there, autonomics can dynamically link service levels to the underlying servers and network/storage infrastructure that supports those services. Autonomic capabilities are thus key to nLayers core value and differentiation" Bob Quillin from nLayers.

"…….dynamic topologies and configuration information are natural enablers for everything from root-cause analysis, to inventory and asset management, to change management, to service-level management, to IT governance and information security." Dennis Drogseth, Network World.

Business Service Management

"Our highly complex, ever-changing IT environment must support critical business initiatives and adapt to frequent changes without impacting the level of service it provides. nLayers InSight is the first product we've found that gives us an accurate picture of how our infrastructure components and business applications relate to and depend upon each other. Having this knowledge can dramatically improve our problem response time for current critical business systems while helping us design and implement a more efficient, adaptive application infrastructure. We believe that nLayers InSight will help us realize a significant cost savings." Hari Makkala, CTO of People's Bank.

"When there's a failure at the network, one that could affect the company's service level agreement (SLA) with customers, administrators are left with a huge blind spot if they don't have a picture of the performance of storage and network devices.

If you're blind to that you cannot troubleshoot -- you can't fix and restore the service. Just knowing the software and servers is not enough. You also need to know the storage and network devices that need to relocate or be cloned so that business services can be fully functional in the new or alternate location." Gili Raanan, CEO, nLayers Inc.

"To provide any real value, a discovery solution must be capable of automatically rendering a complete picture of the largest, most complex enterprise, including all servers, devices, software, and network elements." Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president at Forrester Research.

IT Architecture

"nLayers allows users to create a model in which companies can see the levels of demand for each application component of their IT stack. Then users can consolidate resources, prepare them for disaster recovery, optimize for merger & acquisition outcomes, track compliance issues,etc. Over it all is a rolling model of resource demand that shows companies just which applications are being used, at what levels, by whom, when. Simply put, it's a real-time model of your application infrastructure." Demir Barlas, Line56, E-Business Executive Daily.

"The good thing about ... InSight is that it can give you a snapshot of your infrastructure and give you trending-how you're performing from week to week." InSight user Anthony Mills, manager of network operations at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

"With nLayers InSight, CIO's can automatically discover and track the resources they possess to analyze the effectiveness of their current IT environment and ultimately make better-informed decisions in support of the business." Gili Raanan.nLayers CEO and founder.

ITIL

"ITIL recognizes the need for relevant software tools to support enhanced levels of automation in areas such as discovery, inventory and audit. At the heart of ITIL lies the configuration management database (CMDB)." William Baker, CEO, Resonance Group.

"Whether in active or passive mode, nLayers InSight is the only completely agentless discovery solution that offers instant, end-to-end IT visibility through a completely passive deployment along with the ability to selectively apply active discovery to "drill down" for very detailed information on specific services or components." Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal

"At a specific level, what's exciting is the ability for nLayers to integrate its CMDB change detection features - detecting configuration item (CI) variations and application dependency mapping and interrelationship changes - and integrating them with a higher level autonomic function that can take action and affect a change to the environment - either manually or automatically. That truly is the ITIL vision of IT Service Management process automation." Bob Quillin from nLayers.

"A configuration management database (CMDB) strategy is central to the IT Service Management framework implementation described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) documents. ... By adopting a federated CMDB approach, IT organizations can leverage data repositories throughout their environment through integration and utilization of open interfaces to share data." "According to ITIL, "Many organizations are already using some elements of configuration management, often using spreadsheets, local databases, or paper-based systems. In today's large and complex IT infrastructures, configuration management requires the use of support tools, which includes a [CMDB]." Dennis Drogseth, Network World.

"..... the adoption of the relatively new technology is accelerating because of the increasing complexity of n-tier application infrastructures, the need to comply with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the need to predict the impact of failures to plan for disaster recovery." Gili Raanan.nLayers CEO and founder.

nLayers Specific

"Mapping IT relationships and dependencies need not be a manually intensive process" William Baker, CEO, The Resonance Group.

"To provide any real value, a discovery solution must be capable of automatically rendering a complete picture of the largest, most complex enterprise, including all servers, devices, software, and network elements. A partial snapshot of one tier or a set of components simply isn't enough to enable organizations to succeed in implementing many of today's most critical, enterprise-wide business/IT initiatives. nLayers InSight is solving a really difficult problem." Jean-Pierre Garbani, vice president at Forrester Research.

"Our partnership with nLayers gives Opsware customers access to best in class discovery, enhancing their ability to achieve the full benefits of an automated IT environment. Together, Opsware and nLayers provide enterprises with the most rapid path to Web application deployment and optimization so they can reap the rewards of greater operational efficiencies and cost savings." Tim Howes, CTO of Opsware Inc.

"Unfortunately, automating IT management is no small project. nLayers provides a rapidly achievable milestone for many automation and business-IT-alignment initiatives. InSight is easy to set up and provides a quick payback, displaying application mapping quicker than any of the other products, though its probe-based passive collection through packet inspection required footprints on all our segments. Application-dependency information was surprisingly detailed--InSight discovered a DNS server and all the clients relying on it." Network Computing, Best Value Award.