CML Working Group Releases Plans for SML-Based Specification.

Goal is to Help Organizations Simplify the Management and Deployment of Services While Reducing Costs

NEW YORK -- The Common Model Library (CML) working group, a consortium of 11 leading technology companies, today for the first time released detailed plans for its CML specification based on the Service Modeling Language (SML). The details were released in a white paper, available at www.cml-project.org, which describes basic goals, example-use scenarios, and an overview of the plan of work. The proposed CML specification is expected to be presented to an appropriate standards body for acceptance as a public standard.

CML will provide an extensible library of models and common modeling elements that can be shared, extended, and reused in communications across IT management tools and resources -- simplifying the management and deployment of services while reducing costs. Where appropriate, CML will leverage existing management data sources, industry standards and recognized best practice efforts.

The working group is comprised of BEA Systems, Inc., BMC Software, CA Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell Inc., EMC Corporation, HP, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and Sun Microsystems.

The proposed CML specification is expected to include:

* A library of models expressed as SML compliant documents

* Common and shared modeling elements expressed as SML document fragments

* Guidelines for encoding models

* Patterns & best practices

* Semantic definitions

* Examples and scenarios

* Compliance or conformance suites, validated at group workshop meetings.

CML uses the SML and the SML Interchange Format (SML-IF) specifications recently submitted to the W3C. SML is well suited for encoding CML models because it defines an XML representation for modeling concepts like references between coherent sets of documents and XML Schema extensions to constrain the references. SML also provides the ability to apply constraints to a model. The specifications are now available at W3C's SML Working Group web site: http://www.w3.org/XML/SML.

Quotes from member companies:

"CML is an important step in helping to enable interoperability among IT management tools, and continues to increase in importance as customers move to Dynamic Business Applications," said Zulah Eckert, senior principal technologist, Office of the CTO at BEA Systems, Inc. "We are pleased to be working closely with other industry leaders to create and co-author standards to help enable the increased automation necessary to simplify the management of our customers IT infrastructure."

"BMC's involvement with the CML working group stems from a sincere desire to simplify IT management by providing a set of comprehensive resources that assist IT managers to address the specific needs of their organizations. Our hope is that the CML specification will take some of the needless uncertainty out of IT management, allowing managers to confidently deploy new services that add value to the business," said Tom Bishop, chief technology officer, BMC Software.

"Effective enterprise IT management requires a coherent, vendor-neutral vocabulary for describing people, processes, and technology," said Marv Waschke, senior technology strategist at CA. "This vocabulary must transcend the traditional boundaries of business, IT services, and operations. The Common Model Library whitepaper lays the groundwork for building such a vocabulary. CA looks forward to contributing to the Common Model Library, and we expect to see our customers reap significant benefits from in areas such as CMDB federation, systems provisioning, and systems deployment."

"Cisco's network management products are migrating to provide a common platform for managing a diverse suite of networking products and services, including those of third parties. It is essential that they be able to exchange information with other management systems. A common language to enable this exchange will enable our common customers to facilitate and automate ever more of these functions," said Paul Gleichauf, chief technology officer of Cisco's Network Management Technology Group. "Cisco is pleased to have the opportunity to collaborate closely with our CML partners as a significant step in bringing these standardized capabilities to the marketplace."

"Dell is excited to participate in the standardization of XML configuration metadata using SML," said John Wilson, technology strategist, Office of the CTO, Dell Inc. "We look forward to the time when development tools include CML configuration information in every software package so that all System Management products can interoperate."

"EMC is participating in the CML working group to help develop this work to the level of acceptance and adoption by a leading technical standards body," said Jeff Nick, senior vice president and chief technology officer, EMC Corporation. "EMC believes that model-based management solutions represent the right paradigm to successfully manage the highly complex, multi-domain IT infrastructures emerging in today's enterprises. As many EMC products are developed in accordance with industry standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM) and Storage Management Initiative-Specification (SMI-S), the multi-vendor CML effort based on SML is reflective of EMC's own strategy to ease heterogeneous product interoperability and management in customer environments."

"Leveraging CML within HP Business Technology Optimization software technologies allows our customers to better orchestrate, automate and optimize critical tasks and processes in the entire lifecycle of services," said Mark Potts, chief technology officer, Business Technology Optimization, HP Software. "Through this collaboration with industry leaders, HP can help establish standards and practices that compliment the HP BTO portfolio and help IT organizations reduce cost and risk."

"Working with this broad group of industry partners on a Common Model Library, the goal is to simplify systems management for our clients and help reduce the costs of integrating management models across industries and products," said Alan Ganek, IBM vice president of Autonomic Computing and chief technology officer of IBM Tivoli software. "CML complements IBM's Service Management strategy by providing clients with improved visibility and control over their multi-vendor computing environments and enabling the ability to better automate tasks and processes."

"This is an important milestone for the working group as the CML standard will foster further industry collaboration," said Kevin Cline, director, Client Standards and Initiatives, Intel Corporation. "CML and WS-Management will help customers realize the vision of IT automation and reduced total cost of ownership."

"The creation of a Common Model Library that defines a consistent expression for management concepts furthers the work we have done with the industry on SML, and should enable key customer scenarios around sharing management data in the complex enterprise environments that are common today," said J. Keith Bankston, senior program manager at Microsoft Corp, and chairman of the CML Working Group.

"CML holds the promise for improved management integration in heterogeneous data center environments," said Bill Smith, senior director for Business Strategy, Sun Microsystems. "Sun xVM Ops Center is built around XML model based management. We're pleased to collaborate with other industry leaders on model interoperability to further extend customer value."