Enterprise Management Gets Web Standards

A key model for enterprise management information has been completed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the industry body announced today.

The DMTF said the specification would enable cross-vendor interoperability using Internet standards and would cut through the complexity and incompatibility in much of today's management systems.

The announcement marked the completion of the group's work on the specifications of a Web-based enterprise management (WBEM) framework, built on what it described as a Common Information Model. The addition of the CIM over the HTTP standard would allow "implementations of CIM to interoperate in an open, standardized manner." The CIM over HTTP specification adds to the existing CIM and CIM over XML standards.

"This finally allows us to have information systems that share management data, to build a community of managed devices and systems over Internet protocols," said DMTF chairman Jim Turner, who also works at Cisco. "Today, management products have difficulty sharing information."

"If we wanted to make our [Cisco] products available to a management system, [until now], we have had to do it in a proprietary fashion," Turner said.

He cited products such as Windows 2000 and Sun's Java development tools as being WBEM-enabled.

"We hope to have some real demos of interoperability in the next few weeks," he said.

"We applaud any initiative that promotes open standards," said Simon Moores, chairman of the U.K.-based Research Group. "We stand on the eve of the biggest commercial revolution since double-entry bookkeeping -- we won't get there with proprietary standards."

"It's a logical conclusion since the Internet protocols are the lowest common denominator," said CommerceNet managing director Neil Ellul. "They had to get the three pieces together to have it make any sense. The proof of any standardization is when vendors adopt it. Since this an easier way of doing things, I expect they will look at it closely."

The DMTF board consists of representatives from Cisco, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM/Tivoli, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Novell, SCO, Sun Microsystems, and Symantec.