The Manageability Initiative is the keystone of the EMF's activities. Traditionally the focus of standardization activities in this area has been on management . The Creation of the Enterprise Management Forum represents the first time that a group has been formed that focuses instead on the problem of manageability . The key distinction between these two related concepts is that management provides the high-level function that aggregates and interprets data, determining which actions need to be taken. On the other hand, manageability is the ability of a resource to provide the data and control capabilities that need to be present in order for it to be managed.
Management depends on resources having the characteristics of manageability .
Without these characteristics, the effectiveness of management systems is severely limited. In the case of current management products, the lack of standards for manageability leads to the need for each system to provide its own instrumentation and control infrastructure, leading to problems of interoperability and a potential explosion of management agents. The Management Initiative is the umbrella for a series of projects which together will provide an open manageability infrastructure which will be available to all management systems to use. Implementers of resources will be able to integrate their products into the infrastructure, thus making them manageable by any management system which uses the open infrastructure. Management Vendors benefit from not having to develop all the low level, instrumentation and data generation capabilities for aq myriad of diverse platforms and components.