Management Matters this month:

FEATURES

• Message from the Chairman: Innovation in IT Management
• Now Available: Text Console Redirection Profile
• Five Preliminary Specs for Member Review
• Trusted Computing Group and DMTF
• Improving Processes within DMTF

EVENTS

• Last Chance to Register: MDC
• CDM Event at MDC
• CIM 10th Anniversary Party and Star Awards

REGULARS

• Member Survey Results: Emerging Technologies
• Quote of the Month
• Call for Contributors
• Featured Question and Answer
• Member Feedback Welcomed

Message from the Chairman: Innovation in IT Management

By Mike Baskey, DMTF Chairman

This month, I’d like to highlight the recent submission of the CMDB Federation specification to DMTF and discuss the implications of this submission for our organization. The draft spec, which was initially developed by industry leaders BMC Software, CA, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and Microsoft, represents groundbreaking work for DMTF for several reasons. First, it blazes new trails for DMTF by carving out a focus around management repositories that are scoped at the IT process level and also deals with federation of various models, one of which is the Common Information Model (CIM). Second, it gives DMTF a broader context for some of our model-related work with other standards groups--such as the CIM-SID harmonization work with the TeleManagement Forum. As a result, our models will evolve to address even more resources, thereby leveraging the work being done within DMTF and demonstrating yet again our valuable contributions to the industry. As this technology evolves, use cases that employ this technology will help make DMTF an even more integral part of improved IT service management.

DMTF’s cross-industry representation of more than 15 technology alliance partners, 4,000 individual members and 200 companies, makes it the ideal forum for creating and maintaining an industry standard for CMDBf. Moreover, our organization will help increase the technology’s reach within the IT industry.

Whatever your focus--whether in enterprises or a particular management domain (network, storage, applications, etc.) or even service providers seeking to define the set of management artifacts at the level of a CMDB --consider how the new work underway may affect and enable your company’s products in this space. From a technology perspective, many exciting developments are on the horizon. Among them:

• the ability to federate data without the need to replicate it
• the ability to better reconcile identities of discovered resources across multiple sources
• the availability of a graph query mechanism to better optimize data access across a wide variety of management disciplines and numerous management domains

I encourage all of you to check out the CMDB Federation specification for yourselves, get involved, and help shape CMDB Federation to make it fit the evolving needs of the industry. Please contact me with any questions or comments at chair@dmtf.org.
  
Mike Baskey
DMTF Chairman

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