Method, device, and program storage device for autonomous software life cycle management

A method of searching for and installing a software product on a device is provided. One or more capabilities needed by the device to be served by a software product are determined. The one or more capabilities needed by the device are communicated from a software life cycle management agent on the device to a yellow pages agent outside the device, the communicating comprising formulating a request comprising a list of the capabilities encoded in a description language that defines the capabilities semantically. Then locations of one or more software products matching the one or more capabilities needed by the device may be received from the yellow pages agent. One of the one or more software products to install may be selected based on automatically evaluated criteria. Then the selected software product may be downloaded using its received location, and the selected software product may be installed on the device.