The organisations will coordinate their developmental processes and priorities to ensure that DMTF's Common Information Model (CIM) and Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards address grid technology requirements. DMTF and GGF's Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) and Open Grid Services Infrastructure (OGSI) teams will collaborate, communicate and coordinate management modelling and services. The organizations will share input on requirements, modelling and service proposals and review of standards. Representatives from DMTF and GGF will also participate in each others' relevant working groups and mutually influence the development of their respective technologies.

"This liaison between DMTF and GGF exemplifies the mission of DMTF's Alliance Partner programme to promote coordination and collaboration so organisations can take full advantage of each others' work to meet the challenges facing our industry", stated Winston Bumpus, president, DMTF. "Realising that the enormous potential of grid computing depends, in part, on the integrated management of thousands of distributed resources and services, GGF can now leverage DMTF's progress with CIM and WBEM to address that important piece of the puzzle."

Grid computing relies on the Internet to build distributed computing and communication infrastructures providing to the scientific community, industry, government and the public at large dependable, consistent, pervasive and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities. This facilitates and supports the creation and development of regional and global computational and data grids.

"Grid computing is about putting components together whether these are information components or computing components or other technologies, to create a virtual system. Common specifications - interfaces and protocols - allow this integration to happen", stated Charlie Catlett, a Senior Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and Chair of GGF. "By working together, DMTF and GGF can create another type of virtual system, one that brings together expertise from the distributed management community and from the grid community. This ensures that grid standards take full advantage of technologies such as CIM and WBEM, while at the same time informing the development of DMTF standards with the requirements of grid computing standards and applications."

Collaboration and unification of standards is integral to the progress of the computing and networking industries. Although this particular agreement addresses the relationship between the DMTF and GGF, DMTF alliances with other standards organizations facilitate broad unification of management semantics. The goal of these alliances is the creation of consistent model definitions across all management domains, which allows GGF, for example, to utilise the various management models included in CIM. DMTF and GGF will also collaborate to ensure that the standards of other complementary organizations are incorporated into its work.