Hewlett-Packard Co. announced plans on Monday to submit its Web Services Management Framework (WSMF) for industry review to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
OASIS is a non-profit organization and international consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of product-independent formats based on public standards. These standards include SGML, XML, HTML as well as others that are related to structured information processing.
WSMF is an architecture for managing computing resources – including Web services themselves – through Web services, said Lynn Anderson, vice-president marketing, enterprise, for HP Canada in Mississauga, Ont.
Anderson said the push for the WSMF fits within the company’s Adaptive Enterprise strategy – HP’s vision for the enterprise which operates on a consumption-based model by matching business demand and processes to IT supply.
“The framework is the notion of managed objects and their relationship,” she added.
A key parcel of the Adaptive Enterprise strategy is the Web services framework. Web services, Anderson explained, are a foundation by which all of the virtual IT assets will actually expose management information about themselves and how they can be managed.
“Most IT environments out there are multi-vendor environments and therefore publishing to a standard by which these objects will be managed and communicated to, allow companies to have flexibility of multi-vendor environments but being able to move resources from applications or services on the fly,” Anderson said.
In order to have the Adaptive Enterprise vision succeed, Anderson said it is critical to have the standards approved by OASIS.
Industry supporters for the push for standardization of this framework include Sun Microsystems Inc., BEA Systems Inc., Iona Technologies PLC, Oracle Corp., and TIBCO Software Inc.
IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have not joined the push behind this framework so far, Anderson added.
Having as many key players as possible involved in the framework will help move the standard forward, she said.
“The more important players that you have, the more likely that the framework will be adopted and integrated within their application,” she said. “Understand that we all work in a world that is multi-vendor. This will allow companies to incorporate their management capabilities in Web services rather than building later on – it really does protect investment for an end-user as well as the vendor community itself.”
HP said it will speed the adoption of an open specification for end-to-end management of Web services with their partners once a Web service standard is approved.
HP has made the framework available on the company’s Web site, in an effort to garner feedback from the general public. It is available for download at http://devresouces.hp.com/wsmf. HP is on the Web at www.hp.com. OASIS is also online at www.oasis-open.org