Technology Leaders Submit Modeling Specification to the World Wide Web Consortium

BEA Systems Inc., BMC Software Inc., CA, Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Inc., EMC Corp., HP, IBM Corp., Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. today announced they have submitted a specification to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for review as an industrywide standard. Called the Service Modeling Language (SML), the specification defines a consistent way to communicate how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described — or modeled — in extensible markup language (XML) and can help businesses more seamlessly manage the services that are built on these resources. In addition to the base SML specification, a companion specification was submitted to the W3C. Called the SML Interchange Format (SML-IF), it defines how to exchange SML models between applications.

With industry collaboration, SML enables a hierarchy of IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service, reducing costs and system complexity for customers. These blocks can be defined at the appropriate level of granularity for desired-state management. They include validation constraints that increase the reliability of integrations, opening the door to increased automation. If adopted as a standard, SML will address the industry problem of numerous methods representing the same IT resource. Currently, the use of different formats requires a translation process that can lead to the loss or misinterpretation of technical details.

SML offers support for rich constraints and alignment with XML message exchange architectures — unique properties that make it well-suited for modeling IT resources and services. SML allows developers to build modeling information for applications, IT infrastructure and services that can be used during all stages of the resource life cycle, including deployment and configuration management and resource updating. They are also useful for tactical processes such as management of service levels, availability and capacity.

To visit the member submission page go to http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/01.

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Quote Sheet

“As an industry leader, BEA Systems is committed to working collaboratively to create and
co-author standards like SML that enable interoperability and simplification of IT management systems. Given the W3C’s support and success with XML standards, we are excited to have SML submitted to the W3C for standardization. With SML, BEA continues with our commitment to provide leadership in the development of W3C XML and Web services standards.”

— Zulah Eckert

Senior Principal Technologist

Office of the CTO

BEA Systems Inc.


“Business Service Management (BSM) advocates simplicity, efficiency and interoperability in managing the IT ecosystem. The submission of the SML language to W3C puts us one step closer to helping customers simplify the management of their IT environments, bringing them even closer to their BSM goals.”

— Tom Bishop

Chief Technology Officer

BMC Software Inc.


“By promoting standardized modeling of complex IT services, SML will facilitate the management of those services — independent of the development technologies and platforms. CA plans to leverage SML in management solutions that will provide greater flexibility, more automated control and lower cost of ownership.”

Edward Marootian Jr.

Vice President of Product Management and Strategy

Office of the CTO

CA Inc.


“Dell is committed to simplifying the management of IT resources so customers can focus on growing their business. SML is an essential piece of Dell’s Unified Manageability Architecture that delivers a standards-based blueprint for simplified, modular systems management and enables a path to ‘built-in’ management for hardware and software that can yield more robust systems modeling, enabling high availability and standards-based building blocks for business process management.”

— Winston Bumpus

Director, Systems Management Architecture and Standards

Dell Product Group

Dell Inc.


“EMC believes that model-based management solutions represent the new path to successfully managing the highly complex, multidomain information infrastructures emerging in today’s enterprises. The multivendor SML effort is an important building block and reflective of EMC’s standards-driven strategy to ease heterogeneous product interoperability and management in customer environments. We look forward as W3C accelerates the adoption of this foundation technology.”

— Jeff Nick

Senior Vice President and CTO

EMC Corp.


“HP believes that automation of IT management processes is a key enabler of Business Technology Optimization because it will help our customers improve IT delivery times, reduce costs and decrease the risks of human error. Automating these tasks will also help reduce the business risk of IT and give enterprises better visibility into the impact of planned or unplanned IT events. SML is an important technical building block toward such levels of automation.”


William Vambenepe

Distinguished Technologist

HP Software


“The submission of SML to W3C is an important milestone for bringing open frameworks into IT management solutions on behalf of our customers. As a leader in open standards-based software, this is an important step in IBM’s effort to collaborate with other industry leaders to extend modeling and self-managing capabilities within multivendor IT environments.”

— Ric Telford

Vice President

Autonomic Computing

IBM Corp.


“Along with our fellow industry leaders, Intel believes SML is another step in providing enterprises with flexible management and innovative Web services. Using SML, a model-based management system can be built for critical production environments, helping ensure data centers of tomorrow are fully integrated, fully managed and fully scalable. These are mandatory principles from concept to provisioning and from operation to obsolescence.”


— Robert B. Crooke

Vice President and General Manager

Business Client Group

Intel Corporation


“Customers tell us they need solutions that that make it easier to integrate and manage end-to-end IT services in heterogeneous environments. That is why Microsoft is delighted to work with the industry and W3C to help define a true standard for interoperability. It’s also why we contributed our work on the System Definition Model (SDM) to form the basis of SML. We are deeply committed to SML as a core technology to enable the Microsoft Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) across the full scope of our platform and management products and development tools. We look forward to working with our partners and the industry to help customers realize greater value from IT through SML.”

— Kirill Tatarinov

Corporate Vice President

Windows® and Enterprise Management Division

Microsoft Corp.


“Model-based management is proven technology for today’s complex IT environments. SML provides a solid foundation for robust exchange of management information across the enterprise, leading to lower TCO and improved business agility. Sun views open industry standards as fundamental enablers of heterogeneous IT systems, and we’re pleased to join forces at the W3C to move SML through the standards process, following which Sun will appropriately use SML technology within its product portfolio.”

—Bill Smith

Director of Business Alliances

Sun Microsystems Inc.