5.2 What is DMTF?

The DMTF was formed in May of 1992 as a cooperative effort of eight companies: Digital Equipment Corporation^TM, Hewlett-Packard^TM, IBM^TM, Intel^TM, Microsoft^TM, Novell^TM, Sun^TM, and SynOptics^TM. The objective of the DMTF was to provide a simple solution for desktop manageability.

The DTMF created a standard interface that handles communication between any management application and all the manageable products on -- or attached to -- a desktop PC or server.

This standard is called the DMI. For more information on the DMI, refer to the DMI Specification Version 2.0 at http://www.dmtf.org

The DMI is:

• Independent of any specific operating system, hardware platform, or management protocol

• Easy for vendors to adopt

• Scalable, to accommodate a wide range of products from very simple to very complex and extensible

• Mappable to existing management and remote protocols