DMTF, TM Forum Team Up

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF), and TeleManagement Forum (TM Forum) today announced efforts to converge their shared information and modeling approaches to help support telecommunications/enterprise management convergence. The organizations agree that best practices from both telecommunications and enterprise environments can be combined to provide optimal management in all scenarios.

The TM Forum and DMTF have traditionally been major players in the telecommunications and enterprise industries, respectively, and both have recognized the industry trends and drivers toward convergence. Each has developed its own shared/federated information models: DMTF's Common Information Model - CIM; TM Forum's New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) Shared Information and Data - SID. They are now collectively working on the potential for integration of these shared information models to also support the essential need for telecommunications / enterprise convergence.

"Examples of converged services include voice over IP (VoIP) and the integration of other forms of traditional connection-based and connectionless services. These new generation services are increasing the need to manage computing and storage resources in the telecommunications environment, and to operate telecommunications and enterprise hardware and software in an integrated fashion," said Winston Bumpus of Novell, president, DMTF. "Today's announcement is evidence of both DMTF and TM Forum's commitment to the needs of our rapidly converging industries, and this new level of collaboration is an exciting development."

"The line between the enterprise and telecom is becoming irrelevant as customers seek to have end-to-end management of devices, services and applications," said Martin Creaner vice president and CTO, TM Forum. "Although TM Forum and DMTF approach the development environment differently at the level of the meta-model, both organizations are working on the same basic areas - that of systems, physical entities, software and applications, services, statistics and policies. Both organizations also have embraced an object-oriented design approach, with extensibility by both the organization and vendors as a key goal. We're looking forward to working with DMTF further."

TeleManagement Forum

Distributed Management Task Force