Microsoft and Industry Partners Submit WS-Management Specification

BETHESDA, Md. — Sept. 15, 2005 — Today at Enterprise Management World, Microsoft Corp. announced that it, along with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), BMC Software Inc., Computer Associates, Dell Inc., Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, Intel Corporation, NEC Corp., Novell Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc., Symantec Corp. and WBEM Solutions Inc., has submitted the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) specification to the Distributed Management Task Force Inc. (DMTF) for further refinement and finalization as a Web services-based management standard. WS-Management provides a common manageability protocol that allows interoperability across heterogeneous hardware and operating system environments. The announcement was also made by Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server™ Division, in his keynote address at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 (PDC05) in Los Angeles.

The Web services specification addresses the cost and complexity of IT management by providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across their entire IT infrastructure. By using Web services to manage IT systems, deployments that support WS-Management will enable IT managers to remotely access devices on their networks, regardless of whether the systems are just out of the box, powered down or otherwise unavailable.

“The submission of WS-Management to the DMTF marks the first step toward more interoperable, scalable and secure systems management based on a common protocol standard,” said Felicity McGourty, director of Marketing at Microsoft. “We look forward to refining the WS-Management specification with the DMTF and the industry to deliver easier-to-implement and cost-effective systems management solutions to our customers.”

Industry Partners Broadly Support WS-Management in Solutions

“CA is pleased to work with the co-authors and the DMTF to make WS-Management the standard for applying Web services technologies to desktop management,” said Saqib Syed, director of Unicenter product management at Computer Associates (CA). “Web services offers a compelling architecture for unifying management of resources and assets across the enterprise. As the industry leader in enterprise management, CA plans to implement WS-Management support in Unicenter and other management software products so that our customers can take full advantage of Web services.”

“WS-Management is the future external interface for Intel Active Management Technologies,” said Lorie Wigle, marketing director for the Manageability and Platform Software Division at Intel. “AMT enables out of band remote management capabilities to both PC desktop systems and servers. Working with Intel AMT, WS-Management will provide a common, cost-effective method to manage networked systems.”

“Customers want simplicity in all aspects of IT infrastructure management, especially when it comes to managing systems in the data center. WS-Management is a key component in enabling customers to simplify heterogeneous deployment and ultimately lower TCO across the entire data center,” said Sohrab Modi, vice president of N1 Systems at Sun Microsystems. “To interoperate with Microsoft and others, Sun will implement the WS-Management protocol in our Sun Fire x64 systems, the Solaris 10 operating system and in our N1 systems management products.”

Additional Support for WS-Management

“WS-Management has proven to be scalable to meet the most demanding embedded implementation in our product line,” said Swen Anderson, CTO at Peppercon. “Our KIRA 100 ASIC-based solutions stand representatively for Peppercon’s complete platform controlling KVM-over-IP product line. It shows WS-Management managing servers in a completely secure manner. Peppercon’s business is to deliver embedded remote management products that provide simple, reliable, out-of-band remote access to server environments. We are pleased that WS-Management is available now and will further help reduce IT management costs and complexity, and increase service uptime for our customers.”

Microsoft supports WS-Management in Microsoft® Windows Server 2003 R2 and in the next release of Microsoft Operations Manager. In March Intel announced the Intel Active Management Technology architecture specification and said iAMT will implement WS-Management in hardware beginning in 2006. In addition, the other co-authors have publicly committed to supporting the specification in their respective products.

WS-Management, originally known as WMX, was first demonstrated at the WinHEC 2004 conference in Seattle. WS-Management has received extensive industry feedback, and the WS-Management version 2 specification was published in March 2005 following numerous feedback and interoperability workshops with implementations beyond those of the 12 co-authors. The co-authors are committed to the development of open industry standards to help drive widespread adoption of WS-Management as the Web services-based management protocol and are looking forward to future collaboration to bring together more cohesive systems management architecture. Sun Microsystems, Intel and Microsoft have announced their plans to deliver products implementing WS-Management.

The WS-Management specification has been published at the following locations:

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