With the variety of application platforms and technologies in use today, companies demand standardized approaches to managing these heterogeneous platforms. This is where WSDM can play an important role. WSDM, or Web Services Distributed Management, began as an OASIS Technical Committee in February 2003. For the past two years, leading management vendors have been working within the OASIS group to create a set of standards that use Web services technologies for management. OASIS officially approved a set of WSDM standards in March 2005.
In this article we take a much closer look at the various WSDM standards, the capabilities offered by some of these standards, and present some useful case studies that demonstrate the benefits of WSDM. The intention is for software architects and developers who design software that must be managed to gain a much better appreciation for the value of WSDM.