CA has joined a working group that is drafting a new specification to consistently express how computer networks, applications, servers and other IT resources are described—or modeled—in extensible markup language (XML) so businesses can more easily manage the services that are built on these resources.

Called the Service Modeling Language (SML), the specification enables a hierarchy of IT resource models to be created from reusable building blocks rather than requiring custom descriptions of every service, thus reducing costs and system complexity for customers. The group plans to submit the draft specification to an industry standards organization later this year. In addition to CA, group members include BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cisco Systems, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft Corp. and Sun Microsystems. 

"Enterprise IT organizations have struggled for years to optimally manage corporate computing environments that are both very heterogeneous and very critical to business performance," said Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president, innovation at CA. "The broad industry embrace of SML will help bring greater order, unity and rationality to this IT management challenges—enabling customers to re-allocate resources from ownership to innovation."