OMI
You may have noticed that I mention WMI from time to time 
Up to now WMI has been a Windows technology. Powerful but limited to Windows. WMI has taken a giant step into the big bad world with the creation of OMI – Open Management Infrastructure thats WMI for non-Windows systems
Details are here
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/06/28/open-management-infrastructure.aspx
and
https://collaboration.opengroup.org/omi/
Expect more on this in the months to come