Ten major IT vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Hewlett-Packard on July 31 launched a standards initiative to create a common method using XML for describing network elements, servers, applications and other IT resources.
The group, which also includes BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC and Sun Microsystems, published a draft specification for the XML modeling on each of their respective Web sites.
The aim of the effort is to help “insure greater interoperability between heterogeneous IT service offerings from different vendors,” said Ed Anderson, marketing director for Microsoft’s Dynamic Systems Initiative in Redmond, Wash.
The group, which hopes to gather additional feedback from other IT vendors and user organizations, intends to create a “common foundation for establishing more automated and self-managing IT services,” added Anderson.
If the standards effort succeeds, the benefit to end-user organizations will be more effective implementation of managed services across multivendor systems.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Big IT Players Aim to Simplify Data Center with XML
