Object Management Group - History

History

Founded in 1989 by eleven companies (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, American Airlines and Data General), OMG's initial focus was to create a heterogeneous distributed object standard. The founding executive team included Christopher Stone, Richard Soley, Bill Hoffman and John Slitz. As of November, 2012, the leadership includes Chairman and CEO Richard Soley, President and COO Bill Hoffman and Vice President and Technical Director Andrew Watson.

Since 2000, the OMG's International Headquarters have been located in Needham, Massachusetts. In November, 2012, the headquarters was moved from 140 Kendrick St to 109 Highland Ave.

The goal was a common portable and interoperable object model with methods and data that work using all types of development environments on all types of platforms.

In 1997, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) was added to the list of OMG adopted technolgies. UML is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering.

In June 2005, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) and OMG announced the merger of their respective Business Process Management (BPM) activities to form the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force (BMI DTF).

In 2006 the BPMN language specification was adopted as a standard by OMG.

In 2007 the Business Motivation Model (BMM) was adopted as a standard by the OMG. The BMM is a metamodel that provides a vocabulary for corporate governance and strategic planning and is particularly relevant to businesses undertaking governance, regulatory compliance, business transformation and strategic planning activities.

In 2009 OMG, together with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon, launched the Consortium of IT Software Quality (CISQ). CISQ brings together industry executives from Global 2000 IT organizations, system integrators, outsourcers, and package vendors to jointly address the challenge of standardizing the measurement of IT software quality and to promote a market-based ecosystem to support its deployment.

In 2011 OMG formed the Cloud Standards Customer Council. Founding sponsors included CA, IBM, Kaavo, Rackspace and Software AG. The CSCC is an OMG end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud's successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud. The Council is not a standards organization, but will compliment existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness they have with traditional IT environments. CSCC is open to all end-user organizations.

In September, 2011, the OMG Board of Directors unanimously voted to adopt the Vector Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) as the latest OMG specification. Work for adopting the specification was led by Mentor Graphics' Embedded Software Division, RunTime Computing Solutions, The Mitre Corporation as well as the High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative (HPEC-SI). VSIPL is an application programming interface (API) defined by an open standard developed by embedded signal and image processing hardware and software vendors, academia, application developers, and government labs. VSIPL and VSIPL++ contain hundreds of functions used for common signal processing kernel and other computations. These functions include basic arithmetic, trigonometric, transcendental, signal processing, linear algebra, and image processing. The VSIPL family of libraries has been implemented by multiple vendors for a range of processor architectures, including x86, PowerPC, Cell, and NVIDIA GPUs. VSIPL and VSIPL++ are designed to achieve high performance, increase programmer productivity and maintain portability across a range of processor architectures. Additionally, VSIPL++ was designed from the start to include support for parallelism.