The PoC demonstrated a common and standard communications protocol and a standard and discoverable interface type. These permitted us to abstract the specific implementations of enterprise components, systems, utilities, and IT business processes.

Each of these elements was able to communicate freely and discover others using a common protocol. We were able to see true enterprise-level autonomic behavior in which the low-level objects and technologies behave in a way that fit with the business needs to meet the SLA; we also saw the business functions involved making the right decisions.

In addition, we were able to reuse the WS-Management protocol stack and integrate it with existing manageability processes and toolsets. The effort required to do this was minimal–more time was spent increasing the flexibility of the stack than in creating the functionality.

We successfully demonstrated the use of the HTTP/SOAP protocol to automatically self-announce a device as it is introduced to the network. We used the same methodology to demonstrate self-announcement of adds or changes to software on the device. We integrated self-announcement with automatic end-point interrogation over WS-Management; and we successfully used WS-Management to automatically populate a CMDB with the data gathered from the interrogation. We designed a means to define a group of behaviors under the umbrella of a policy and to define a way to identify system attributes to trigger the application of these policies.

Using WS-Management, we communicated the need to apply the behaviors to a compliance system. We used WS-Eventing as a trigger to start an event management "transaction." We made event management automatically intersect with ITIL processes and communicate the need to apply a known solution to a compliance system over the WS-Management protocol.

We effectively demonstrated a well-behaved system self-management. We were able to automatically discover and provision new devices, just out-of-the-box, by having the Intel AMT simulator initiate the discovery process OOB, then through policies provisioned the entire stack, resulting in the automatic addition of a new piece of hardware to an existing IT service to provide more computing power. We were also able to utilize WS-Catalog to represent and expose the MO metadata in a standard way to drive standard-based and free communications between components in a loosely coupled manner.

Some of the main challenges moving forward include the industry adoption for the WS-Management protocol suite as open standard: there is a need for all layers in the stack, from the hardware to the applications, to "speak" WS-Management and implement the WS-Management standard and discoverable interfaces. IT departments need solutions that support WS-Management off the shelf.

Another key challenge concerns industry support for the complete MO discovery mechanism through standards, and for making it part of WS-Management. MO self-announcement is a key missing ingredient; most other parts of the discovery process can already be enabled via WS-Management.

Intel AMT can enable the root of the device discovery process and support a hardware layer in all platforms for the autonomic enterprise computing demonstrated in this paper. There is a need to promote a standardized data model in the CMDB for MOs with their attributes and associations, as well as for policies and their association with MO types. Standardization of message content is another key challenge for moving forward toward semantics in the enterprise.