Commercial Decisions

Assuming that your company is manufacturing, and hoping to sell, this PBX, one decision you will have to make is how to handle the model that you are going to createwill you try to initiate or at least encourage a standardisation process through the DMTF, will you publish the model so that manufacturers of management systems can access it or will you keep the model secret as an asset for your company?

With a simple device like this PBX, this is probably not an important decisionthere are few mof classes and their positions within the common and core models are fairly obviousbut if your company were to manufacture a genuine PBX, a core router or piece of optical transmission equipment then the decision would be harder. You would need to address some or all of these questions:

• Are you dominant in your market and, if so, are there small companies trying to break in who might club together and use a standardised management strategy as a lever against you ("buy from us and get standard management interfaces, buy from our large competitor and get locked into a proprietary one")? Or are you one of the small companies trying to break in?

• Can you afford the time to take your model through the standardisation process? Before the DMTF will be willing to accept your model, at least two companies will need to present it together (to ensure interoperability). Are you willing to work with one of your competitors to do this?

• Is the ease of management a competitive advantage for your product? Note that this does not indicate whether or not you have a wonderful management workstation with excellent graphical user interface. WBEM/CIM does not address the operator interfaceonly the storage and manipulation of the on-device management information.

• Do you make money from selling the management workstations or just by selling the PBXs? If you make money from the workstations then making the model public is probably going to hit your sales. If, on the other hand, you only make real money from selling the PBXs, then a PBX which can be managed by an industry-standard management system might be more attractive to your customers.

• Will your PBX be installed alongside other devices (IP routers, storage arrays) which are already managed by WBEM/CIM? If so, could you gain competitive advantage by allowing your customers to manage your device in the same way?