2010 a Record Year for DMTF

Posted on Tue, 01/18/2011 - 08:50

Winston Bumpus, DMTF President

With a full two weeks of the New Year behind us, I wanted to take a moment to review the remarkable achievements DMTF recorded in 2010. I’ve been involved with DMTF for a long time and I can confidently say 2010 was one of, if not the, best years ever.

On the technical front, nearly 60 documents were released as DMTF specifications, schema and profiles in 2010, as well as five CIM schema update releases. We also completed many whitepapers and work-in-progress releases and continued to work on developing dozens of specifications within various work groups. In addition, ANSI adopted our OVF specification, which is now on its way to international review. Many more specs were put in the pipeline for adoption at both the national and international levels. This was an amazing amount of work to accomplish in a single year and would not have been possible without the strong leadership of Jeff Hilland, our VP of Technology, and those members who have so tirelessly dedicated themselves to technical endeavors for DMTF.

We also continued to make progress on our mission to enable greater interoperability. Under the leadership of Tom Butler, our VP of Interoperability, and through countless hours of work on the part of our Systems Management and CDM Forums, we launched the first DMTF conformance programs for CDM and DASH. This was a major milestone and will serve as the foundation for future conformance programs to build upon.

2010 also brought much advancement in our work with partner organizations and academic institutions. We hosted our academic conference, SVM ’10, in Ontario Canada, and presented at Tokyo University in conjunction with the Global Inter-Cloud Technical Forum (GICTF). We also sent representatives to meetings in Brussels as part of the SEINA project. Additionally, we have increased our interaction and coordination with other standards organization as we continue to work together to improve the management and interoperability of cloud computing. Many thanks to Mark Carlson, our VP of Alliances, and all of our Alliance Committee members for their work to maintain these important industry relationships.

On the marketing front we continued to drive our message forward, under the leadership of Valerie Kane, our VP of Marketing. We participated in seven industry events, most with booth presence and one-on-one interaction with customers and vendors, and took part in many additional speaking engagements. We also approved a charter for DMTF’s first regional marketing sub-committee in Japan. In addition, the marketing committee launched a redesign of the DMTF web site that allows our customers and members to find information more easily.

We have continued to improve and refine our processes and added several new incubators thanks to the leadership of Josh Cohen, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors.  These processes enabled us to successfully complete the work undertaken by the Open Cloud Standards Incubator and transition into full-fledged specification development within the Cloud Management Workgroup. The incubator process has been so successful that we have seen many additional incubators launched this year as a pre-standardization activity.

Finally, the administration and oversight of our organization has seen solid progress under the leadership of Mike Baskey, our Chairman of the Board of Directors, Shishir Pardikar, our VP of Finance, and Wayne Adams, our VP of Membership and Senior Vice President. Their efforts have been a critical component of DMTF’s success in 2010. Our finances are strong despite the difficult economic climate thanks to good financial oversight and better than expected membership growth. We also added Kes Wold as DMTF’s official Executive Director, and look forward to his continued contributions driving the operation of the organization.

I believe DMTF’s work is more relevant now than ever. Our platform standards currently ship in millions of systems. Our virtualization and cloud management work is being reviewed and adopted by dozens of vendors and other institutions. We have active engagement with customers and several US and international government agencies, including our ongoing work with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as they and other geographic regions look for improved interoperability of their infrastructures.

What an amazing year. Thank you to all of our members whose hard work and collaboration have made this year one of our best ever. I look forward to continuing to work with you all to achieve even more in 2011.