Last March, 4 major IT players (Intel, Microsoft, IBM and HP) have jointly released an interesting document regarding the convergence of web services for management, resource and events. Since I have not read many headlines about this, I wanted to highlight what it’s all about.

In the world of web services there is a plethora of specifications to address the service capabilities for resources, events and management. Multiple industry and standardization groups are involved such as  OASIS, DMTF, W3C or WS-I.
But there are also private initiatives driven by specific vendors such as Microsoft. The 4 IT companies mentioned above have also contributed many efforts for the developments of web service specifications. Other industry and standardization
groups are primary consumers of web services such as the Global Grid Forum for their Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) standard. The SNIA might also become a consumer of web services specification for the SMI-S standard as the
bridge between WebServices and CIM becomes gradually possible with the WS-CIM development effort at DMTF.

So where’s the dilemma? Well clearly over time the different web services camps have opted for different architectural solutions (e.g. OASIS WSDM and Microsoft WS-M) and such differences have resulted in increasing development difficulties for application vendors and for future standards. The service orientation of management framework is heavy trend across many segments of the IT industry and a lack of interoperability / compatibility between such web standards could seriously impact the adoption of  web services solutions. Today’s differences affect features such as notifications of events, state of managed resources or the discovery of services capabilities, just to name a very few.

So the proposed converging web services plan is encouraging and I hope that such new set of specifications will become useful industry standards as soon as possible.

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