  Message from the President: Working TogetherBy Winston Bumpus, DMTF President DMTF’s main purpose is to collaborate and develop interoperable management standards for the good of our customers and the industry. Over the years, we have successfully created many specifications and white papers in this collaborative development paradigm. Several years ago, we realized that other industries organizations could build upon our technologies to help their efforts to develop specifications in their domain.Nearly 10 years ago, in August of1998, DMTF developed an Alliance Partner program and invited The Open Group to be our first Alliance Partner. Over the years, we have formed many alliances to increase the use of our technology and to expand the areas which use them. The program has helped our technology to be realized in areas such as storage, grids, printers, telephony, and security. Now with our most recent alliance with The Green Grid, our technologies are being evaluated for use in data center power management. Our alliances are important to the success of the DMTF mission. Like any successful relationship, it requires good cooperation, communication, and most importantly it requires taking the time to listen well to the partner. Recently, we held our annual Alliance Partner Technical Symposium (APTS) in San Jose, Calif., under the guidance of Mark Carlson, our VP of Alliances. It was a great opportunity to share the work we are doing and find ways we can improve how we work together. Several of these proposed improvements are already underway, and I expect more in the coming months. Last year, there was a request to enable work submitted to DMTF to have the ability to recognize the submitting organization in the released specification. That process is now in place. This year, we’ll take our collaboration to a new level as we address the issue of how to federate a partner’s work to ours. We are committed to solve that problem before we meet again. Other good suggestions were discussed at APTS 2008, such as the creation of a common calendar for our events to reduce schedule conflicts and to create better synergy for our events. As our specifications mature and new technologies emerge, it will become increasingly important to work together as an industry. Our Alliance Partner program is an effective tool that allows us to continue to improve the dialogue with our partners and find better ways of working together.
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