Alex Honor of ControlTier posted a cool suggestion for BarcampESM called "Getting Enterprise Developers on board with ESM". Incidentally, this was actually tried once before and it was called The Application Management Specification (AMS). AMS was developed by Tivoli in 1995 to expand the original Desktop Management Forum (DMTF) work for managing distributed applications. Around that time I taught "Tivoli Plus Module Construction" classes to Tivoli OEM partners. We used all of the AMS specifications for the vendor product integrations. Tivoli had a really cool toolkit/wizard called the "AMS Module Designer". The Module Designer would enables an application to become management ready throughout its life-cycle. The AMS spec included the following:
Application Distribution
Application Installation
Dependency Checking
Application Monitoring
Application Configuration
Operational Control
Deploying updates and new releases
Application component relationships (BSM)
Security Management
Application Response Time Management
The Module Designer would output generic specification files that then could be used by any vendor that did ESM. If you were a vendor that did software distribution you could abstract the application distribution, installation, and configuration specs and implement them using your vendor specific technology. Likewise for event management and monitoring vendors. Although the idea was great most non-Tivoli vendors refused to back a specification that was developed by Tivoli and it never went anywhere.
If you want to see more on the history of the Module Builder I will be posting a blog entry about it on my site johnmwillis.com
John
