The Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard provides the foundation for enabling the use of Web services technology to manage distributed IT resources, offering one set of instrumentation to manage resources to address the problem of management integration.
One of the biggest challenges facing IT managers today is the growing complexity of IT software and hardware. Companies use increasingly advanced products from multiple vendors to run their businesses, and as these solutions become more sophisticated, it becomes a significant time- and money-intensive challenge to effectively manage the multiplicity of resources. Standards, however, provide common guidelines for the development of new technologies, enabling products from different vendors to work together in a seamless fashion.
Just as the HTML standard allowed interoperability on the Web, the WSDM standard allows interoperability in the managing of resources like applications, servers, and databases. A wide range of IT companies are already using WSDM to create technology and products that customers can use to manage resources from multiple vendors in a standardized way. WSDM uses Web services as a methodology to provide essential distributed computing functionality, interoperability, loose coupling, and implementation independence. Manage is one of the core building blocks of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which uses standards-based interfaces to help companies build flexibility into their infrastructure using new and existing IT assets. That in turn helps customers increase the flexibility of their business processes and strengthen their underlying IT infrastructure, all of which is critical to developing an on demand business.
WSDM is a foundation for solving the needs of our customers to exploit Web services and manage heterogeneous environments today, which results in a reduction of complexity and provides significant value to all areas of the IT industry. Customers can manage products from multiple vendors more easily-deploying new resources quickly, enabling dynamic system management, and reducing setup and installation time. Software vendors can take advantage of the standards to consistently deliver increased functionality and reduce the cost of application development over time. And device manufacturers can expose management interfaces in a standard way, regardless of how the internal instrumentation is done.
On December 14, 2005 IBM announced a set of software development tools that leverage the WSDM standard. Available free of charge on IBM's alphaWorks Web site, the tools help developers take advantage of WSDM to create products that ease IT management burdens for customers. In addition to providing the software development tools , IBM has products available today that include initial implementations of WSDM such as IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, as well as 30 products that support the initial WSDM event format.
IBM, Microsoft®, HP and Intel® are planning to develop a common set of specifications for resources, events, and management that can be broadly supported across multiple platforms.
Read the press release and learn more about how you can get started with the WSDM standard.
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