The WBEMsource Initiative is designed to bring about open-source
standards-based systems management, with special focus on the
Common Information Model (CIM)/WBEM standards managed by the
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). Yeah, that’s a lot of
verbiage, folks, but the bottom line is that this is an important
project in bringing some level of uniformity to management tools
for large systems — an idea that plays well for corporate users.
As Sun says:
“Sun’s contribution allows developers to leverage and
build upon Sun’s WBEM implementation and the significant
advancements it has made to the standard to date. The high costs of
heterogeneous networks, consisting of hardware, software, and
storage from multiple vendors, as well as the difficulty for these
interconnected systems to be consistently managed by the same
applications, increases the need for new management standards that
will enable the exchange of information between management systems,
applications and services.”