PORTLAND, Ore. – August 31, 2010 – Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that its Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard version 1.1 has been adopted as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) standard. This achievement marks a major milestone in DMTF’s efforts to enable interoperable, platform-independent cloud and virtual management solutions.

OVF has been designated as ANSI INCITS 469 2010 by the INCITS Executive Board. INCITS is accredited by ANSI, the organization that oversees the development of American National Standards. ANSI accreditation signifies that the procedures used by the standards body in connection with the development of American National Standards meet the Institute’s essential requirements for openness, balance, consensus and due process.

“ANSI adoption of OVF provides additional validation of the importance of this standard for virtualization management,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. “Since its introduction, OVF has achieved wide scale adoption. We are extremely honored to receive this national recognition for our efforts to enable interoperable IT solutions for the virtual data center.”

DMTF will continue to work with INCITS to submit OVF to the International Standards Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) for adoption as an international standard.

First published in March 2009, OVF simplifies interoperability, security and machine lifecycle management by describing an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of workloads consiting of one or more virtual machines and applications. This enables software developers to ship pre-configured, ready-to-deploy solutions and allows end-users to distribute applications into their environments with minimal effort.OVF is the cornerstone of DMTF’s virtualization standards efforts and is also considered an important foundation for the organization’s cloud standards development.

The ANSI INCITS 469 2010 standard can be purchased through the ANSI website at www.ansi.org and INCITS website at www.incits.org.

About DMTF
DMTF enables more effective management of millions of IT systems worldwide by bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of systems management standards. The group spans the industry with 160 member companies and organizations, and more than 4,000 active participants crossing 43 countries. The DMTF board of directors is led by 15 innovative, industry-leading technology companies. They include Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); Broadcom Corporation; CA , Inc.; Cisco; Citrix Systems, Inc.; Dell; EMC; Fujitsu; HP; Hitachi, Ltd.; IBM; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; Oracle; and VMware, Inc. With this deep and broad reach, DMTF creates standards that enable interoperable IT management. DMTF management standards are critical to enabling management interoperability among multi-vendor systems, tools and solutions within the enterprise. Information about DMTF technologies and activities can be found at http://www.dmtf.org.

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