Lions lying down with lambs. Cats and dogs, living together. That's what it sounded like last week as heavyweight arch-rivals BEA, BMC, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Sun announced that they had been working together for more than six months on a new specification called SML, aimed at making life easier for their large, heterogeneous customers.

So what is SML? No, not Standard ML (a 20-year-old programming language), or Spacecraft Markup Language, but Service Modeling Language - an XML-based modeling language that provides a consistent way to document the hardware and software resources that make up business services, and the relationships between them. The idea is that SML will provide a standard language that will allow various management tools to understand each other to help customers manage IT service in heterogeneous environments.

I expect that this happened in part as a response to the establishment of the Open Management Consortium - a group formalized in May 2006 and now containing more than 25 members, aimed at advancing the promotion, adoption, development, and integration of open source management software. But it is also a partial answer to a serious IT management challenge - that of understanding and managing the business services provided by highly heterogeneous environments.

Large enterprises need a widely supported standard that can bring together the management aspects of these diverse environments to reduce IT service management complexity and cost. While SML is not a global panacea, the specification has the ability at least to help to integrate some aspects of currently separated service management solutions.

However, this announcement exposes some major concerns. Firstly, none of the recognized standards bodies have reviewed this "standard," let alone ratified it. The SML working group has developed it behind closed doors, and while they plan to present it for verification, the group still does not know whether it will be the DMTF, ISO or W3C. The group has also chosen to develop it separately, rather than put their efforts behind a real open standard like WS-Management. Moreover, where in this diverse and otherwise competitive group is CA, or for that matter, challengers such as LANDesk and Altiris? Solaris, AIX, Windows and HP-UX are obviously represented, but where is Linux - at least in the form of major management vendor Novell, if not also Red Hat? And possibly most importantly, where are the application vendors - such as SAP and Oracle - and the enterprise users that this is supposed to assist?

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.