By Winston Bumpus

DMTF celebrates its 15th anniversary today. Established in the early 90’s and incorporated in 1995, DMTF has established itself as the industry organization leading the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards.  The organization, which started with a small group of companies, is now comprised of more than 150 member companies, and more than 4,000 active participants spanning 43 countries.

DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing industry leading companies together to collaborate on standards critical for management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools and solutions within the enterprise.  In the last 15 years, this collaboration has resulted in significant progress toward the development of an interoperable IT management ecosystem.  Beginning with the development of foundational standards like the Desktop Management Interface (DMI) and Alert Standard Format (ASF), DMTF has evolved into one of the foremost contributors to management standards. Some of DMTF’s many accomplishments include:

•  Developing and driving the adoption of the Common Information Model (CIM) as the primary foundation for server and desktop management, resulting in CIM becoming one of the most widely implemented system and network management information models to-date.
• Providing a standard format for how motherboard and systems vendors present management information to management applications that use DMI, CIM or direct access through the System Management BIOS (SMBIOS) standard, which is implemented in most desktop, mobile and server systems.
• Unifying the management of distributed computing environments through its Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards.
• Developing a comprehensive architecture for intercommunications among management subsystem components through its Platform Management Components Intercommunication (PMCI) standards.
• Extending CIM to evaluate the health of computer systems in multi-vendor environments through the Common Diagnostic Model (CDM).
• Enabling a common mechanism for systems to access and exchange management information across the entire IT infrastructure through the Web Services Management (WS-MAN) standard.
• Extending WS-MAN to deliver standards-based web services management for desktop and mobile client systems and for providing architectural semantics, industry standard protocols and profiles to unify management of the data center through its Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) and  Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) standards, respectively.
• Driving the development of open standards for virtualization management (VMAN), including the Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
• Facilitating information sharing between configuration management databases and other management data repositories through the Configuration Management Database Federation (CMDBf) standard.
• Establishing forums dedicated to ensuring interoperability of DMTF implementations, and encouraging adherence to DMTF specifications through various conformance programs.
• Championing the adoption of DMTF standards by widely recognized national and international standards bodies.
• Spearheading industry collaboration on the development of cloud management standards.

The work highlighted above represents only a fraction of DMTF’s achievements. In addition to leading the development of key management standards DMTF has served as an ambassador to the industry, forming alliances with other industry and academic organizations to help spread the adoption of DMTF standards.

The success of DMTF standards and initiatives is a direct result of its members. DMTF members have dedicated countless hours to supporting the organization’s goals and initiatives. Without their tireless efforts, none of these accomplishments would have been possible. Congratulations to everyone who has contributed to DMTF’s success these past 15 years. Here’s to another 15!