WS-Management has been ratified as a Final Standard based on implementation experience

PORTLAND, Ore. April 29, 2008 The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTFÆ), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today announced that its Web Services for Management (WS-Management) standard has been ratified Final. Since its debut in April 2006, WS-Management has been successfully implemented in a wide range of products from DMTF member companies moving it from a Preliminary to Final Standard.

IT managers benefit from WS-Management because deployments that support the standard will enable them to remotely access devices on their networks - everything from desktop and mobile systems and servers today, to power management and virtualized environments in the future. WS-Management helps reduce the cost and complexity of IT management by leveraging Internet protocols and standards to manage diverse deployments of the Common Information Model (CIM) instrumented devices. It also helps enable a secure, simple and low-cost platform for managing mixed IT environments.

The WS-Management standard, the latest component of DMTF's Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, has provided an important building block ingredient for DMTF management initiatives. The WS-Management standard is also referenced as the protocol of choice for both the Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) and Systems Management Architecture for System Hardware (SMASH) initiatives.

"With broad industry support from our member companies, the WS-Management standard enables IT end-users to employ Web services to manage IT systems," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "The standard is already widely adopted and referenced in two of our DMTF initiatives. We look forward to a wide range of WS-Management implementations in emerging management domains such as power management and virtualization."

The WS-Management specification promotes interoperability between management applications and managed resources by identifying a core set of Web service specifications and usage requirements to expose a common set of operations that are central to all systems management. The specification also enables the same protocol interface to be used in various scenarios for different operating systems and system states, and provides a security profile to ensure encrypted and authenticated exchange of data.

WS-Management is an important specification in support of the DMTF effort to expose the CIM resources via state-of-the-art Web services protocols. Coupled with Web Services CIM and the WS-Management CIM Binding, the WS-Management specification allows systems and services to be managed by a wide assortment of management tools and systems, giving customers a greater choice on the tools they use for their management infrastructure.

Industry Support for the WS-Management Standard "AMD is pleased to see the widespread adoption of WS-Management to help enable interoperable management solutions that benefit IT customers," said Valerie Kane, division marketing manager, Platform Manageability, AMD. "Interoperable systems management enables our customers to manage their diverse IT environments more simply and at lower costs. AMD continues to support DMTF in the adoption of this standard for web services-based management in AMD processor-based platform solutions and in the tools we develop to support the commercial ecosystem."

"Broadcom applauds the efforts of the DMTF to drive this important web services-based specification towards completion," said Vinod Lakhani, Senior Director and General Manager of Broadcom's High-speed Controller line of business. "We have made a firm commitment to support the DMTF through our ongoing involvement in the specification development process, and by supporting embedded WS-Management solutions as a part of Broadcom's widely adopted Ethernet Controller portfolio. WS-Management is the underlying management protocol in Broadcom's TruManage technology, which enables simple, low-cost, energy-efficient and secure platform manageability for enterprise computer systems."

"Working with customers and partners to deliver on the DMTF WS-Management specifications is what our drive to simplify IT is all about," said Ed Reynolds, director of systems management solutions, Dell Product Group. "WS-Management specifications simplify IT by giving customers choice in standard, web services-based, remote manageability of their data center operations. We're also working hard to drive those benefits further with the integration of technologies like virtualization and energy management."

"DMTF's WS-Management standard paves the way to reduced total cost of ownership by enabling secure, standards-based management of data center infrastructure. As WS-Management gains traction within embedded management solutions and across popular operating systems, it will enable data center managers to automate a broad range of systems management tasks and more easily consolidate management toolsets," says Greg Huff, Chief Technologist, HP Industry Standard Servers. "HP supports WS-Management today with its Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) technology, allowing users to remotely control server power from HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) and other management clients that conform to the WS-Management standard."

"Intel has invested in DMTF's WS-Management standard at every stage of its development, from helping author and submit the standard to integrating WS-Management support into IntelÆ vPro technology-based platforms," said Gregory Bryant, vice president Digital Office Platform Division at Intel. "The release of the WS-Management specification promotes interoperability across the variety of management solutions in the industry, and helps IT managers take advantage of vPro's support for WS-Management."

"As WS-Management has evolved on the path of creation, development and standardization, Microsoft has played an active role in the process as well as adopting the technology directly into our various offerings such as the System Center suite and the Windows platform," said Brad Anderson, General Manager Management and Services Division at Microsoft. "With the specification reaching the DMTF's final ratification milestone, we look forward to continued accelerated adoption of the standard across vendors to further improve the ability to exchange management data across environments and vendors."

"A key piece of the technical collaboration agreement between Microsoft and Novell is to support the DMTF's WS-Management as a standards-based, interoperable protocol that leverages the web to manage desktops, servers and virtualized environments across distributed infrastructures," said Eric Anderson, vice president of engineering at Novell. "Novell is committed to bringing open source and open standards together to provide system management interoperability across mixed IT environments, which will ultimately help to reduce the cost and complexity of IT management."

"Symantec has been a long time contributor to the DMTF efforts and a provider of interoperable solutions," said Gary Phillips, senior director of Standards and Open Source for Symantec. "WS-Management fits into what many IT organizations are already delivering through web services, thereby easing integration of DASH and SMASH into the infrastructure management regime. With the interoperable management provided through SMASH and DASH, and the improvement of functionality and interoperability over time, we are able to offer even greater value to our customers."

More industry support for DMTF's WS-Management standard - from organizations and companies including Avocent, CA, Oracle, VMware and WBEM Solutions - can be found here.

About the Four-Phase DMTF Standards Process
To ensure interoperability of DMTF technologies, DMTF standards go through a four-phase process. As a proposed standard evolves, its status will change from Work-in-Progress, to Draft Standard, to Preliminary Standard, and lastly Final Standard. During the first two phases, a standard is in draft format and is available to the DMTF membership. After a Draft Standard is approved by the DMTF Board in accordance with the Committee Voting Process, it becomes a Preliminary Standard. During this phase, the Preliminary Standard is released to the public, and companies are encouraged to implement the standard. At this time, implementation feedback may generate change requests against the Preliminary Standard; after all change requests are resolved, the standard becomes a Final Standard. After a standard becomes Final, it will serve as the base specification for any future additional revisions to the release.

About DMTF
With more than 4,000 active participants representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. DMTF management technologies are critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools, and solutions within the enterprise. By deploying solutions that support DMTF standards, IT personnel can choose to deploy a mix of systems and solutions that best meet their users' needs, while reducing management complexity and total cost of ownership. Information about the DMTF technologies and activities can be found at www.dmtf.org.