HP, IBM and CA recently released a white paper describing how we see the different efforts in the area of management for the adaptive enterprise coming together and, more importantly, what else is needed to fulfill the vision. Being a co-author I am arguably more than a little biased, but I recommend the read as an explanatory map of the standards/specifications landscape, from the low levels of the Web services stack all the way up to model transformations and policy-based automated management: http://devresource.hp.com/drc/resources/muwsarch/index.jsp