HP Submits Web Service Management Spec To OASIS

The Palo Alto, Calif., company handed its Web Services Management Framework to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). WSMF is supported by more than a half dozen high-tech companies, including BEA Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.

Web services is an umbrella term for a set of emerging standards for integrating business applications across the Internet using standard interfaces. WSMF is an attempt to provide specifications that software makers can incorporate in their applications, so they can be integrated with tools used in managing web services interfaces and the flow of data among them.

The Web Services Distributed Management group at OASIS is currently working with other specifications contributed by IBM and other management tool vendors.

"It's not the first, but it might be the most significant," Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for high-tech researcher ZapThink LLC, said. "HP is making an aggressive push with their Adaptive Enterprise initiative, and the effort to contribute WSMF, which is very complimentary to their commercial Darwin Reference Architecture, is clearly a move to out-step the competition."

Adaptive Enterprise is HP's term for a trend among IT vendors to provide software that's self-healing and enables companies to add computing power as needed, rather than buy technology based on demand forecasts. Darwin Reference Architecture is HP's framework for building infrastructure meant to deliver on the Adaptive Enterprise.

IBM calls its similar initiative "on-demand computing," and has released several related products. Computer Associates unveiled technology related to its initiative last week at its user conference.

Pay-as-you-go computing has attracted the attention of enterprises because it enables them to use information technology more efficiently. Among the major management tools incorporating such technology are HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli and Computer Associates Unicenter.

Having a standard, web services interface on management tools enables a vendor to wedge its management software into a computing system that might otherwise be all IBM, HP or other vendor. While not part of the HP announcement, IBM is expected to respond with its own technology soon.

"It's quite likely that IBM will be making its position known very quickly," Schmelzer said. "They have been making great strides in the area of web services management, and they have a strong offering with Tivoli.

"In fact, HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli are major competitors, so it makes sense they would submit their own spec and let OASIS sort it out," he said.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.