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.