Software biz is still in digital watch era, says DMTF boss

“We're just building the foundations of application management,” said DMTF president Winston Bumpus in an interview at IDF today.

“Hardware is very solid but I think the software industry is still in its infancy and the difficulty curve has just shot up in the last couple of years. You look at what a mess Y2K was or at the problems with e-voting machines and, as Douglas Adams said, we're really at the point where the digital watch is a pretty good idea.”

Bumpus, who doubles as systems management director at Dell, is trying to combat the management problem with the DASH client-side initiative and SMASH, a server-side equivalent.

“We're catching this at the right inflection point,” he said. “Every five or 10 years there's an opportunity and this is it.”

The DMTF is also working on the OVF standard for virtual machines where Bumpus sees encouraging signs of progress, having managed to get VMware, Xen and Microsoft in the same boat.

“Sometimes there's tremendous work that never flies but we haven't had any controversy,” he said.

Bumpus also sees several other areas that need work, including projectors and displays, grid computing voice/data telephony convergence and security. µ