Importance of Standardization

The DMTF is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and unification of systems management standards and initiatives for desktop, enterprise and Internet environments. Working with key technology vendors and affiliated standards groups, the DMTF is enabling a more integrated, cost effective and less crisis-driven approach to systems management through interoperable management solutions such as ASF.

In the case of ASF, there are several reasons why a standard is very appealing. For example, ASF will enable a company that is using add-in NICs to interchange these cards regardless of the brand. It ensures that different vendors are producing ASF-compliant cards, so that swapping them causes virtually no change to the systems alerting configuration, software or BIOS. Additionally, deploying a standard technology across the enterprise assures reduced training costs for IT administrators by avoiding the headaches of supporting multiple proprietary implementations.