Users have hoped for years that management vendors would standardize, and begin to integrate. Unfortunately, while many vendors paid lip service to sharing management information across platforms, element management systems and task-specific applications, little has come of the effort. Perhaps too many of the players still had market domination, not cooperation, in mind and wanted to keep competitors out of the loop. A level playing field is good for users, but not necessarily good for the leading product vendors. Changes of this scale, however, are slow in coming.
Exclusionary habits are hard to break.
Products are entrenched, along with the ways that businesses use them. DMTF participants have a vision of the future to work towards and a roadmap to get there, but it takes time to build the road. One possibility is a product from Managed Objects called Formula, which consolidates management information from multiple disparate packages and platforms, and creates useful business information from those sources. Formula accesses the databases of these products using Formula adapters and translates the information on the fly eliminating the need to recreate the information into a separate database. In addition, the communication is bidirectional, allowing Formula to send commands to other platforms to be executed.