Web Services – Architecture & Roadmap

( Via William Vambenepe).The grand daddy’s of the computing world - HP, IBM and CA recently released an approach note describing how we see the different efforts in the area of management for the adaptive enterprise coming together and, more importantly, what else is needed to fulfill the vision. The note has explanatory map of the standards/specifications landscape, from the low levels of the Web services stack all the way up to model transformations and policy-based automated management - covering all the key stack elements. I beleive this note is a must read for enterprise architects - for it covers all web service related standards and brings a cohesive binding framework for rolling out SOA/Web Services inside enteprises.
Businesses use information technology components produced by many different vendors. The technologies used to deploy, configure, secure, monitor and control physical and logical IT resources have all evolved independently, resulting in a complex collection of systems management technologies and solutions. Different types of resources use a variety of manageability technologies. Managing business systems in a cost effective fashion boils down to dealing effectively with the complex task of integrating multiple different management technologies. There are many challenges facing the IT systems management community in defining a roadmap for the evolution of management systems to support emerging business environments. The first step of the roadmap focuses on enhancing existing management solutions to leverage the growing functionality and ubiquity of Web services. As Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to garner support within the IT industry for application integration and agility, it makes sense to leverage them for the integration of management. For most companies, the management of IT resources involves attempting to interact with a heterogeneous collection of hardware, software and platform assets. Using Web services for management begins to address and eliminate many of the problems raised by integrating a diverse set of resources into integrated management systems while simultaneously providing a foundation for an SOA compliant management infrastructure.As Web services and service-oriented architectures continue to garner support within the IT industry for application integration and agility, it makes sense to leverage them for the integration of management. For most companies, the management of IT resources involves attempting to interact with a heterogeneous collection of hardware, software and platform assets. Using Web services for management begins to address and eliminate many of the problems raised by integrating a diverse set of resources into integrated management systems while simultaneously providing a foundation for an SOA compliant management infrastructure