Most organizations find that keeping tabs on exactly what systems and applications are related to what specific business processes to be a bit daunting. And now that we're all on cusp of embracing a new world of virtual computing, it's becoming pretty clear that keeping track of what virtual and physical assets are tied to any given business process is going to be pretty much an impossible thing to do manually.

This new virtual reality is going to expose a lot of administrative IT processes for what they really are, a set of occasionally updated spreadsheets that never really reflect what's going on in the IT department for more than half a day.

This situation is giving rise to a greater appreciation for the potential of configuration management databases that promise to make it easier to keep track of the relationships between different systems and applications. Unfortunately, the entire CMDB category has been much maligned over the years because most of the products in this space are little more than relational database replacements for spreadsheets. They do a better job of associating different objects with each other, but they don't do much in the way of remotely discovering changes to the IT environment and then automatically updating the database.

That's pretty much describes the mission that ASG Software has embarked on with a new CMDB offering that is built on top of a proprietary database that makes uses of its own meta-data model. As part of the offering, ASG Software has come up with a tool that remotely scans--without using agents-- the IT environment for changes to virtual and physical servers. Beyond that, IT administrators also have the option of deploying agents to keep track of specific applications that are running on top of those environments.

The ASG approach to solving the virtualization management challenge isn't all that cheap. It requires an investment upwards of $600,000, largely because the underlying database is the same technology that ASG uses to build custom data warehouses.

But ASG says that the time to value around its CMDB implementation is a lot higher than other offerings because it installs faster, discovers the environment quickly and doesn't take eight people wearing lab coats to run.

The whole category of virtualization management is exploding with new entrants almost every day. And of course, established players such as IBM, CA, BMC and a host of others have their eyes on this space as well.

Whether ASG can carve out a niche among all this competition remains to be seen. But one thing for sure is that the vendor community surrounding virtualization management is becoming as dynamic as the virtualization environment itself.