The CIM Representations for Management Specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible infrastructure for management of desktop, mobile, server, virtualized and storage systems.

The key properties of CIM Representations for Management Specification describes how management information modeled by the CIM Schema is represented as a data structure when transferred by the WBEM protocols (i.e., CIM/XML protocol, WS-Management protocol, or Command Line protocol.

An an "open systems" specification, the CIM Representations for Management Specification is intended for use across a wide variety of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and z/OS, as well as a variety of embedded environments.