CIM Matures as a Pervasive Standard and Continues to Expand into New Markets

PORTLAND, Ore. - December 3, 2007- The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTFÆ), the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives, today celebrates the tenth anniversary of the launch of its Common Information Model (CIM) standard. Initially developed in 1997 as a conceptual model to describe the components of managed computing and networking environments, CIM (pronounced sim) has expanded to new markets and evolved to become one of the most widely implemented system and network management information models to-date.

In 1997, the DMTF CIM Sub-Committee, comprised of participants from CA, Compaq (now HP), HP, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Sun Microsystems and Tivoli Systems (now IBM) made CIM Version 1.0 available. During the next decade, CIM gained broad industry adoption.

The standard has been implemented in all major operating systems since Windows 98 and is used as the fabric for server and desktop management. CIM has even moved into the virtual world to serve as the basis for DMTFs virtualization management technology. The technology has also expanded to provide definitions for storage management, peripherals, network components and applications. CIM has been implemented into many products currently offered from many major corporations.

"The tenth anniversary of the CIM standard is a significant milestone for the industry," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president and an active driver of CIM development since its inception in 1997. "Ten years ago, DMTF created a ubiquitous standard to help IT managers streamline increasingly heterogeneous environments. Since then, we've expanded CIM into new market segments. Looking ahead, were excited to pursue new innovations and further adoption of the CIM standard."

A number of DMTF Alliance Partners and member companies have collaborated with DMTF to expand CIM into new areas during the last 10 years, such as:

• SMI-S (Storage Management Initiative Specification), a collaboration with the Storage Networking Industry Association to standardize interoperable storage management technologies based on CIM. Work on SMI-S began in 2002, and it was designated as an ISO/IEC standard in January 2007. Currently there are more than 400 products based on SMI-S that have passed SNIAs Conformance Testing Program (SNIA-CTP).
• WBEM Solutions, a DMTF Board Member company, designs and develops standards-based products and solutions for Systems and Network Management specializing in CIM, WBEM, and SMI-S.

There are also a number of open source projects developed around the CIM standard, including:

• OpenPegasus, a collaboration with The Open Group to create an open-source CIM Server for DMTF CIM objects.
• OpenWBEM, an enterprise-grade open-source implementation of Web Based Enterprise Management that features a CIM server.
• Open Management with CIM (OMC), an open-source umbrella project started by Novell that includes implementations of the Open Standards management profiles and specifications defined by the DMTF, associated tools and utilities, and other CIM/DMTF related projects.
• SBLIM (pronounced sublime), the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability, is an IBM-initiated Open Source project intended to enhance the manageability of GNU/Linux systems. It does so by enabling WBEM, Web Based Enterprise Management.

DMTF has also worked with its alliance partners the Open Grid Forum and the Printer Working Group to add CIM into grids and printers respectively. DMTF is currently working to further adoption of CIM to include networking, power management and new areas of virtualization.

To learn more about the CIM standard, CIM related tools, and all CIM Schemas and specifications to-date, click here.

About DMTF
With more than 4,000 active participants representing 44 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management standards and initiatives. During the last 15 years of its history, DMTF management technologies have become critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools, and solutions within the enterprise. By deploying solutions that support DMTF standards, IT managers can choose to deploy a mix of systems and solutions that best meet their users needs, while reducing management complexity and total cost of ownership. Information about the DMTF technologies and activities can be found at www.dmtf.org.