IBM open sources more code for broad based systems management

14 June 2006

"Wisdom," as WSDM is often pronounced, is an Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard that enables management of a wide variety of hardware and software. The standard brings autonomic, or self-healing, capabilities to systems management software used in data centres.

Automating more aspects of systems management should result in lower IT support costs, as systems bottlenecks become easier to identify, and there is an increase in technology utilization.

IBM officials said that with more than 30 of their products already incorporating WSDM, the company felt that the time was right to open source more of its code relating to the standard. These products include some of its Tivoli systems management software, its DB2 databases, its Rational development tools and its Virtualization Engine.

IBM officials hope that open sourcing their framework will encourage other systems management software vendors such as CA and HP to suspend duplicate development work and embrace the IBM approach for building WSDM interfaces.

With customers seeking systems management for everything, the ultimate aim is to have WSDM in every piece of software including operating systems. Customers have to deal with far too many different systems management tools across their operations and often have to manually integrate those tools themselves.

IBM officials said that they intend to remain one of the leading contributors to Muse for WSDM, channelling critical customer requirements to the open source community.