DMTF and OMG Announce Alliance Partnership; Collaboration Will Help Unify Toolsets for Users of DMTF's CIM and OMG's XMI/UML.

PORTLAND, Ore. -- The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF(R)), the organization leading the development and adoption of management standards for enterprise and Internet environments, and the Object Management Group(TM) (OMG(TM)), which develops standards covering multiple operating systems, programming languages, middleware and networking infrastructures and software development environments, today announced that they have entered into an Alliance Partnership. Under the agreement, the two organizations will work to represent and exchange the DMTF's Common Information Model (CIM) in OMG's Unified Modeling Language(R) (UML(R)) and XML Metadata Interchange(R) (XMI(R)), enabling industry-wide standardized toolsets for application development, including those for distributed management, leveraging the OMG's Model Driven Architecture(R) (MDA(R)).

The work of the alliance partnership will first focus on developing a mechanism for mapping the CIM specification to XMI, with the ability to edit the resulting model in UML tools, which will provide developers and end users with the time savings associated with simplified processes. In addition, the organizations will develop a UML profile for CIM, making it easier for CIM developers to tap into the widely used UML for their modeling work when creating new CIM models.

"This partnership between two of the industry's leading standards bodies will result in significant usability enhancements for developers and end users," said Winston Bumpus, president, DMTF. "The ability to use standard UML tools will help drive further adoption of CIM, while spreading the use of UML to the developers of distributed management technologies. This notable progress toward convergence will provide significant benefits to the industry, allowing users to leverage existing application development tools when developing management applications."

"This broad-based agreement strengthens industry support for both the Model Driven Architecture initiative and DMTF's critical management standards. By enabling the representation and interchange of the important CIM standard using OMG's UML, XMI and related standards, this liaison will allow those that design CIM-based models to exploit the broadly available UML tools from both open source and vendor providers," said Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, Object Management Group. "This will help reduce tooling costs for end users across the industry, and we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with the DMTF on this important work."

About the DMTF

With more than 3,000 active participants, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development of management standards and integration technology for enterprise and Internet environments. DMTF standards provide common management infrastructure components for instrumentation, control and communication in a platform-independent and technology neutral way. DMTF technologies include information models (CIM), communication/control protocols (WBEM), and core management services/utilities. Information about DMTF's standards and activities can be found at www.dmtf.org.

About the OMG

With well-established standards covering software from design and development, through deployment and maintenance, and extending to evolution to future platforms, the Object Management Group (OMG) supports a full-lifecycle approach to enterprise integration which maximizes ROI, the key to successful IT. Headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, and international marketing representatives in Japan and Germany, the Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. More information about OMG can be found at www.omg.org.

Note to editors: MDA(R), Model Driven Architecture(R), UML(R), and XMI(R) are registered trademarks of the Object Management Group. OMG(TM), Object Management Group(TM), and Unified Modeling Language(TM) are trademarks of the Object Management Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.