DMTF Newsletter 2008

Management Matters, September 2008	Page 2

Welcome New Members

Splunk

Alliance Program Feature: How to start an Alliance with DMTF

By Mark Carlson, VP of Alliances

In my role as the VP of Alliances, I often get asked how to start an alliance with a given organization. Forming alliances is important as other Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) may be doing similar work or be interested in leveraging and sharing each other's technological developments. Coordinating work can lead to faster standards development and fewer product conflicts for customers.

To initiate a new Alliance, it is necessary to commit the time and work to be an advocate for the partnership. The advocate kicks off the effort to get a work register in place and shepherds it through DMTF's approval process. The process for putting a work register in place is documented in DSP4003.

DMTF just approved an update to the process document allowing a more flexible relationship with alliance partners, if appropriate. The new process allows delegation and federation of work to alliance partners in helping DMTF to produce standards. DMTF increases efficiency by delegating work that would otherwise all need to be done within the organization and allows the partner to use its own processes. Open organization standardization work allows the overall standard management effort to scale better and the standards to be more widely applicable to different domains.

DMTF Alliance work is done by the Alliance Committee (AC), which meets weekly to review work registers or updates, get status updates on alliance work items and plan the DMTF-sponsored Alliances. The main alliance event is the annual Alliance Partner Technical Symposium (APTS), featuring joint meetings with Alliance Partners. The AC is currently working on plans for next years APTS to be held in San Jose, Calif. in March.

Every year DMTF sponsors an academic conference with refereed papers. This year's conference, SVM'08, will be held in Munich in late October. Also, we are considering sponsoring an issue of a leading academic journal, all in an effort to highlight and reward the research happening in the management industry.

Working with the Object Management Group on a UML profile for CIM

This month, we spotlight DMTF Alliance Partner Object Management Group (OMG), a nonprofit computer industry consortium. The OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration modeling standards that enable design, execution and maintenance of software technologies. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries.

OMG, formed in 1989, has kept membership and participation in standards processes open to all organizations and attained international reach. Each organization, regardless of size, gets one vote. The Board of Directors reflects many organizations that work with enterprise and Internet computing. Membership includes hundreds of organizations, some being software end-users, and others being both large and small in the computer industry.

The OMG/DMTF collaboration has been strong since 2004. Together, we work to develop and maintain computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications. This alliance joins the efforts of these two organizations in making a UML profile for CIM. OMG contributes its experience in UML tools and concepts, while DMTF shares its knowledge in CIM technology. The partnership allows the organizations to share knowledge of different technologies and to participate at organizational conferences and technical meetings.

This month, OMG will host the OMG Technical Meeting in Orlando, Fla., at the Walt Disney World Resort from Sept. 22-26. The meeting will include OMG Technology Tutorials, as well as Business Architecture Information Day, Business Architecture WG and SOA Consortium Meeting.

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