DMTF Releases WS-Management Specification to the Public; Leading Standards Body Furthers IT Management with Web Services Standard.

SAN DIEGO -- The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF(R)), the industry organization leading the development of management standards and integration technology for enterprise and Internet environments, today announced the public release of the DMTF Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification. WS-Management addresses the cost and complexity of IT management by providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the entire IT infrastructure, and this version will expand the specification with important improvements in key areas such as extensibility, integration and terminology. At Microsoft Management Summit this week, members of the DMTF are demonstrating the latest version of WS-Management in real-world implementations.

Since its submission to the DMTF in September 2005, WS-Management has been further strengthened by the participation and input of the DMTF's broad membership. This version delivers upgrades that significantly enhance ease of use. In addition, the latest version includes an expanded addressing model to provide improved extensibility, enabling existing systems to better integrate with WS-Management. WS-Management is the first specification in support of the DMTF initiative to expose CIM resources via a set of Web services protocols.

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. By using Web services to manage IT systems, deployments that support WS-Management will enable IT managers to remotely access devices on their networks -- everything from silicon components and handheld devices to PCs, servers and large-scale data centers.

"The DMTF has continued the aggressive development of WS-Management since its submission to our organization, and today's public release further advances WS-Management with the support of the DMTF," said Winston Bumpus, chair, DMTF. "Web services architecture is key for the future of management, and the DMTF has a number of initiatives underway to allow the management information in the DMTF's widely-used Common Information Model (CIM) to be exposed in the Web services environment. We're pleased to issue this release, and to show the progress in this area through the DMTF's WS-Management demonstrations at Microsoft Management Summit this week."

About the DMTF

With more than 3,500 active participants representing 39 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development of management standards and the promotion of interoperability for enterprise and Internet environments. DMTF standards provide common management infrastructure components for instrumentation, control and communication in a platform-independent and technology neutral way. DMTF standards include the Common Information Model (CIM), communication/control protocols like Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) and Web Services for Management (WS-Management), and the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) initiative. Information about DMTF's standards and activities can be found at www.dmtf.org.