The Register has a piece on how all the major players in the industry are making strides to standardize the interface for management software.

"Intel, Dell, HP and IBM stole top billing in an announcement from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), touting the new CIM (Common Information Model) specification for servers. Other vendors such as Sun Microsystems, AMD, Oracle and Microsoft also chipped in their names for the program. Collectively, the companies make up what the DMTF is calling the Server Management Working Group.

The basic tenets of the server collective are modeled on a similar push already underway in the storage industry to develop a shared set of interfaces for management software. Where the storage vendors have the Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S), the server vendors will create their own version of CIM."

Sounds to me like an Open Source project would be "one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them..." :)