The road map outlines the progress made on various standards dating back to 1999, and it describes emerging Web services specifications that are expected to lead to the develop- ment of new management tools over the next three years, said William Vambenepe, a manage- ment software technologist at HP.

Vambenepe was one of five authors of the 21-page report, which is dated June 2 but made its first public appearance last week. The document details a common technology approach that’s designed to simplify the process of managing existing systems and IT installations based on service-oriented architectures (SOA).

IT tasks that will have to be taken into account as part of advanced systems management scenarios include provisioning, policy-based management, unified resource discovery, resource virtualization and utility computing, according to the road map.

WSDM Evolving

CA, IBM and HP also are driving the development of Web Services Distributed Management, one of the new standards mentioned in the road map. Software based on WSDM was run on a Black Berry handheld as part of a demonstration at last week’s event, Global Grid Forum 14.

Microsoft Corp. is building a similar specification with help from other vendors. “Technically, Microsoft is not very far from where we’re going,” Vambenepe said. “We don’t expect one model. There are lots of models.”

WSDM, which in March was approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards in Billerica, Mass., defines a basic set of manageability features for tasks such as identifying IT resources and the relationships between pieces of equipment.

In a statement, Microsoft said the Web Services Management specification it’s co-authoring with Dell Inc., Intel Corp. and other vendors is being designed to work on small, resource-constrained devices in addition to larger systems.

But last week’s BlackBerry demonstration proved that WSDM code can work on a small device, according to Vambenepe. “WSDM has no problems scaling down,” he said, adding that the BlackBerry demo code was created by IBM. HP has written its own code for its iPaq handhelds.

Jason Bloomberg, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Waltham, Mass., said the road map helps demonstrate that progress is being made on technology for Web services and SOAs. “In general, all the vendors realize they have to play along with interoperability,” Bloomberg said. “Politics still could get in the way. But customers get upset with vendors that don’t interoperate.”

He added that although management tools supporting some of the upcoming standards should emerge within three years, they “will definitely be early-adopter products.”