OMG and the ITCM Project Plan International Crisis Management and Response Executive Advisory Council.

Business/Technology Editors

NEEDHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 16, 2002

IT Crisis Management Seminar attracts leaders from

International Organizations, Military, and Industrial Sectors

When international crisis management, peacekeeping, and military organizations have to collaborate in field operations, they can't be fully effective unless their computerized equipment all works together on a common network. To establish needed standards in this area, the Object Management Group (OMG(TM)) and the Information Technology Crisis Management (ITCM) Project will form a Crisis Management and Response Executive Advisory Council with charter members including the ITCM Project and OMG's C4I Task Force, soon to be joined by the NATO C3 Agency, the UN Secretariat, UN Peacekeeping, and OSCE. When fully established, the Advisory Council will structure co-operation among international organizations and IT vendors delivering interoperability solutions and standards required for modern crisis management.

The decision to form the Advisory Council was made at the IT Crisis Management Seminar co-organized by the Crisis Management Initiative and OMG. Co-Chairs former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari and OMG Chairman and CEO Dr. Richard Soley opened the seminar by speaking about the new challenges associated with Crisis Management among international organizations.

"We have to break down the artificial borders between governmental and non-governmental sectors, civilian and military organizations, and public and private sectors. In this globalized world and in the world of new security political challenges and complex crisis situations, we can't afford to stay in our narrow domains," remarked Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland.

Former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Mr. Cedric Thornberry delivered a keynote speech entitled, "Co-operation between the UN and Regional Organizations in Modern Crisis Management Operations." Workshop topics included: "European Union's challenge to guarantee civil military coordination in its future field operations" with General Gustaf Hagglund, Chairman, European Union Military Committee; "Supporting peace in new kinds of conflicts," with Mr. Luiz Da Costa, Principal Officer, Office of the Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, UN; "NATO and crisis management" with Ambassador Robert Serry, Director of Crisis Management and Operations, NATO; and "Using Commercial Technology in Crisis Management," with Admiral Juhani Kaskeala, Chief of Defence, Finnish Defence Forces.

Richard Soley, OMG Chairman and CEO remarked, "Recognition, management and alleviation of national and international crises have become, more than ever before, an international activity. By establishing an Advisory Council comprised of major organizations throughout the world, a partnership would result in standardization around technology specifications that are available in commercial solutions and have been proven in the field, resulting in much higher interoperability between coalition partners."

A meeting is planned for March 2003 in New York City to officially establish the new Crisis Management and Response Executive Advisory Council which will aim to represent a worldwide constituency with participation from all geographic regions of the world.

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. Based on the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), OMG's standards cover multiple operating systems, programming languages, middleware and networking infrastructures, and software development environments. OMG's Modeling standards, the basis for the MDA, include the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM). CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's standard open platform with hundreds of millions of deployments running today. OMG's well-established CORBAservices and industry-specific standards are being re-issued under the MDA in many popular middleware environments. OMG domain (industry-specific) standards cover vertical markets including healthcare, telecommunications, biotechnology, transportation and a dozen other areas. The OMG is headquartered in Needham, MA, USA, with a U.S. government representative in Washington, DC, and international marketing offices in Japan, the UK, and Germany.

The Object Management Group is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry specifications consortium. OMG member companies write, adopt, and maintain the organization's standards following a mature, open process. All current OMG specifications may be downloaded without charge from the organization's website, www.omg.org; the site also provides additional information about OMG and its activities. For information on joining the OMG, or questions not addressed on the website, please contact OMG headquarters by email at [e-mail], by phone at [phone], or by fax at [phone]. The OMG provides current information and services for distributed enterprise computing through The Information Brokerage(R) service on the World Wide Web at www.omg.org and www.corba.org.

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