The increasing complexity of IT systems today warrants a new architectural approach, one that scales with the increasing scope, heterogeneity, and size of systems. The autonomic computing paradigm promises to cope with complexity and scale up to the needs of today's distributed systems.

In this paper, we highlight the major standards that enable components from heterogeneous sources to interact with each other. This interaction is a fundamental tenet that enables intelligent decision making at the lowest possible level in the systems management hierarchy.

We described the standards required for external interfaces for an autonomic element namely WS-Management and WSDM and the general design philosophy of converging these two approaches by unifying the underlying plumbing protocols.