One of the primary yardsticks for measuring the success of a middleware-enabled computing architecture is an increase in manageability of the information delivery infrastructure. The overall goal of this middleware project was a complete end-to-end solution which provided a seamless architecture for the management and tracking of user services and the ultimate instantiation of the services on a target server.
The multi-component system architecture implementing this solution is referred to as the User Services Management System (USMS). This system is unique in that it provides a complete open-source implementation capable of tracking and managing enterprise information services. Of particular importance is the modular and extensible design which allows the system to expand without organizational or geographical limitations. The following sections discuss the essential components of the implementation.