Management Matters this month:

FEATURES

• Message from the President: 2007 - What a Year!
  
• Showcasing the 2007 Star Award Winners
• Now Available: CIM Schema Version 2.17
• Preliminary Release: DASH 1.1 Standard
  
• TeleManagement Forum and DMTF
• Conformance, Interoperability and Certification

EVENTS

• Presentation at Management World Americas 2007
• DMTF a Success at Gartner Data Center Conference
• DMTF Activities at MDC

REGULARS

• Stay Tuned for 2008 Member Survey
• Member Survey Results: Work Groups
• Latest DMTF Press Releases
• Quote of the Month
• Call for Contributors
• Featured Question and Answer
• Member Feedback Welcomed

Message from the President: 2007 - What a Year!

January is always a good time to look back over the year and review the highlights. We had quite a few achievements, changes and firsts. First, we debuted a new initiative last year: DASH (Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware). We also received several new submissions to the organization, including the OVF (Open Virtual Machine Format), CMDBf (federation of configuration management databases) and key pieces of IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface). In addition, DMTF released the CIM (Common Information Model) Schema versions 2.15, 2.16 and 2.17. Also released in 2007 was SMASH 2.0, which not only added new functionality but included new protocol support to bring SMASH and DASH into alignment by having a common protocol for access. Another big chunk of work that DMTF worked on this year was PMCI (Platform Management Component Intercommunications). The transport and binding specs went out, creating the basis for a silicon level management protocol. The aforementioned work, as well as several key specifications and dozens of profiles released by DMTF, will continue to expand our work in new areas of data center management.

We also reorganized our support infrastructure, moving to Wold Consulting to run our operations, VTM, Inc. and Nereus as our new marketing support and PR firm, and adding Patni to provide program management services for our forums and interoperability activities. These changes improve our ability to support our members and the work they do to develop and promote interoperable management standards.

In 2007, we participated in a number of key events, including the Microsoft Management Summit, BladeSystems Insight, Storage Networking World, Server Blade Summit, Next Generation Data Center Conference, Storage Developer Conference, Fall Intel Developer Forum, Gartner Data Center Conference, and Management Developers Conference.

In addition, we not only held an Alliance Partner Summit, but we also hosted the first-ever International Academic Alliance Workshop in Toulouse, France.

On another alliance front, the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Forum joined DMTF as an Alliance Partner. DMTF also celebrated two key milestones: the fifteenth anniversary of the organization and the tenth anniversary of CIM.

Looking back on 2007, it has been a very good year with lots of great people doing exceptional work for this organization and the industry. We continue to work to improve our processes and tools to make our organization more effective. Look for our annual membership survey later this month to get provide input on what is working well, and what we can do to improve as we plan our budgets for our next fiscal year, which starts in April.

We still have a lot of work to do, but it is an exciting time. I look forward to working with you in 2008 for an even bigger and better year.

Winston Bumpus
DMTF President

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