Recently I reported on how IBM were applying SOA within the Tivoli product set itself to enable Service Oriented Management. Whilst seemingly every IT vendor now encourages the use of SOA, and provide products to support adoption by end-user organizations, there is less evidence that vendors themselves have taken SOA to heart internally.
The Systems Management domain has been the most forward thinking in this respect. For example, CA, BMC, IBM, HP, and others have developed the WSDM specification, and have or are implementing in their respective SM products. The driver for WSDM was not just interoperability between SM products and manageable resources, but enabling federated management that enables distributed resources to be managed across the Internet without requiring proprietary agents at each endpoint.
But WSDM is just one part of the distributed management jigsaw. It defines a protocol by which differnt SM products and resources can monitor status and set the resource configuration for example.