Web-based enterprise management architecture

This article is a description of the Web-Based Enterprise Management initiative. It discusses both the substance of the initiative itself, in the form of the overall architectural approach implied by WBEM, and the industry context that gave rise to WBEM. The industry context is the current state of management systems and software, standardization efforts, and the actual systems being managed. These provided the major influences in shaping the evolution of the WBEM initiative. The substance of the initiative is provided by the WBEM process and information architectures that support a scalable and heterogeneous management structure. The various aspects of the process architecture are covered in the article, including the object manager, object providers, schema management, and protocols required for communication among the various components of the architecture. An overview of the information architecture is provided in the form of a summary of the Desktop Management Taskforce's Common Information Model schema implemented by WBEM.