OASIS Forms Committee to Standardize Software Installation Characteristics for Lifecycle Management.BOSTON -- Computer Associates, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC (NEC Corporation, Tokyo, www.nec.com, www.necus.com) An electronics conglomerate known in the U.S. for its monitors. In Japan, it had the lion's share of the PC market until the late 1990s (see PC 98). NEC was founded in Tokyo in 1899 as Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. , Novell, Sun Microsystems, Zero G, and Others Collaborate on Packaging for Distributed Application Environments Members of the OASIS international standards consortium announced plans to collaborate on a standardized method for expressing software installation characteristics required for lifecycle management in distributed, multi-platform environments. The new OASIS Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD (Software Design Description) The architecture of an information system. See IDD. ) Technical Committee will develop schemas to describe the characteristics of installable units of software, relevant for core aspects of deployment, configuration, and maintenance. "In order to increase automation across the life cycle while preserving the option to deploy heterogeneous infrastructure platforms, standards for deployment, configuration and maintenance schemas are essential. This is an important piece in the broader picture of the agile business," said David Sprott, CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of analyst firm, CBDI CBDI Component Based Development and Integration CBDI Child Beck Depression Inventory Forum. "Currently, deployment and lifecycle management of interrelated software sets is predominantly a manual operation, because there is no standardized way to express installation packaging for distributed enterprise applications," explained Thomas Studwell of IBM, proposed chair of the OASIS SDD Committee. "Our work to define a standard for describing the packaging and the means to express dependencies and various lifecycle management operations within the package will alleviate these problems and subsequently enable automation of what are now highly manual and error-prone tasks." The new OASIS committee will define XML schemas for SDDs, a package format to associate SDDs, resource content, and software artifacts. SDDs will describe the aggregation of installable units at all levels of the software stack as well as requirements of targets onto which the solution can be deployed. The resulting XML schemas will be partitioned to allow for layered implementations covering the range of applications from the definition of atomic units of software to complex, multi-platform, heterogeneous solutions. "The SDD effort represents another exciting addition to the growing OASIS portfolio of standards work for the SOA and grid computing space," observed James Bryce Clark, OASIS director of standards development. "The OASIS SDD Committee will benefit by close association with developers of related specifications, including the Web Services Distributed Management “WSDM” redirects here. For the Terre Haute, Indiana radio station, see WSDM-FM. Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM, pronounced wisdom) is a web service standard for managing and monitoring the status of other services. (WSDM WSDM Web Services Distributed Management WSDM Web Site Design Method ) and Data Center Markup Language (DCML DCML Data Center Markup Language (EDS) DCML Disney Comics Mailing List ), both of which are also being advanced within our consortium." Clark noted that the new OASIS Committee also plans to coordinate its efforts with activities of the Global Grid Forum In 2006, the Global Grid Forum merged with the Enterprise Grid Alliance and formed the Open Grid Forum. This article is kept for historical reasons, and should be synchronized with the OGF article. (GGF), Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi), and Distributed Management Task Force Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF, formerly "Desktop Management Task Force") is a standards organisation that develops and maintains standards for systems management of IT environments in enterprises and the Internet. (DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force, Inc., Portland, OR, www.dmtf.org) An industry consortium founded in 1992 that is involved with the development, support and maintenance of management standards for PCs. Its goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of PC management. ). The OASIS SDD Technical Committee will operate under the Royalty Free on Limited Terms Mode, as defined by the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights Policy. The Committee's first meeting will be held 1 June 2005, and participation remains open to all companies, non-profit groups, and individuals. As with all OASIS projects, archives of the Committee's work will be accessible to both members and non-members, and OASIS will host an open mail list for public comment. Industry Support for SDD "Software deployment and IT life cycle management on distributed, multiplatform systems is fundamental to self-managing systems, and we are delighted with the formation of the technical committee to develop this essential standard," said Alan Ganek, CTO, Tivoli Software & vice president, Autonomic Computing, IBM. "We are excited to see IT leaders collaborating to assure interoperability across the industry and address customers' need for improved manageability." "As a leader in multiplatform software deployment, Zero G is proud to be a principal contributor to the SDD specification," said Eric N. Shapiro, CEO at Zero G Software, Inc. "Our new SolutionArchitect product is the first of its kind to bridge the gap between development and operations, driving down software lifecycle management Software Lifecycle Management is the concept that an Independent software vendor can control how its software is licensed and used throughout its usable lifecycle. Because software is not always a static product, vendor's often add additional features and/or updates for security purposes. costs. SolutionArchitect uses the SDD specification to capture and communicate the requirements, structure, and deployment workflow of distributed enterprise applications." About OASIS OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence, and adoption of e-business standards. Members themselves set the OASIS technical agenda, using a lightweight, open process expressly designed to promote industry consensus and unite disparate efforts. The consortium produces open standards for Web services, security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific markets. Founded in 1993, OASIS has more than 4,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. Approved OASIS Standards include AVDL AVDL Application Vulnerability Description Language , CAP, DocBook, DSML (Directory Services Markup Language) A set of XML tags that defines the contents of a directory. Developed by Bowstreet, Inc., Tewksbury, MA (www.bowstreet. , ebXML, SAML, SPML, UBL, UDDI, WSDM, WS-Reliability, WSRP, WS-Security, XACML (EXtensible Access Control Markup Language) An OASIS standard for managing access control policy. Released in 2003 and based on XML, the Sun-developed XACML was designed to become a universal standard for describing who has access to which resources. , and XCBF. http://www.oasis-open.org Additional information: OASIS SDD Technical Committee: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/sdd Cover Pages Technology Report: "Standards for Automated Resource Management in the Computing Environment" http://xml.coverpages.org/computingResourceManagement.html |
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