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WS-Management or WSDM? Time to Bite the Bullet

A year ago on this site , I forecast that the focus of SOA would shift from the production and deployment of services to operational SOA management. That prediction has largely held true. I recently spoke at an architecture conference in Europe and was amazed at the number of sessions (including mine) devoted to the visibility and control of services in a SOA. Last year, it seemed like the main themes were centered on ESBs and security standards, and I was the only speaker discussing SOA management. Times have certainly changed.

I also predicted that OASIS WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) would emerge as an important standard. But I failed to realize that standards take time. And, I also failed to anticipate the emergence of WS-Management, a new specification for Web services based management protocols that currently resides in a subcommittee in the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force).

By the way, both of these standards also help solve other problems related to enterprise management outside the worlds of SOA and Web services. This may explain why the WS-Management specification appears, at least to me, to be less focused on managing the Web services themselves than the OASIS WSDM standard. However, there still is some overlap between the two. The DMTF is working hard to rationalize the impact of all this by supporting both management protocol standards while integrating them with its management model, CIM (Common Information Model).

Still, this rationalization of management standards will take time, and in the meantime, the urgent need for SOA management solutions will only increase. This will mean that many companies and institutions will need to bite the bullet this year, and select from existing SOA management technology, rather than wait to see when OASIS WSDM and WS-Management become widely supported. However, later versions of most SOA management products will likely support the appropriate mix of management standards, whatever that final mix may be.

Now, here’s a new prediction for 2006. The word “policy” will replace “governance” and “ESB” as the industry’s newest, most excessive, and most inappropriately used buzzword in 2006. This is an important word, but we may see blurring of the presently clear distinction between governance policies centered on development and its artifacts (‘Do the services defined in this WSDL document support SAML?’) and the runtime world of management and security which focuses more on decision making and enforcement (‘You can’t access this service if you aren’t a gold partner, but if you are a gold partner, we can help you maintain and prove that you provide a certain service level.’). This may result in misunderstandings between operations and development.

Lastly, from the IT and corporate executive suites, there will be an increasing realization that SOA is more than an IT initiative. Executives will begin to understand that a successful SOA may require some re-engineering of the way that IT and business function together. Large-scale SOA initiatives will often sink or swim based not just on the commitment within IT, but the commitment of important stakeholders within the various lines of business. This will force IT to be a coalition-builder in a way not previously required.