The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) efforts in the virtualization industry are well-known: the body is working to define the open new industry standards for virtual data centers.
In September 2007 the body started the evaluation of a common virtual machine format called OVM (Open Virtual Format), which is already supported by VMware and Enomalism.
In November 2007 the body released a standard for managing virtualized infrastructures, which is already supported by ManageIQ.
Today the DMTF goes a little further, accepting VMware as board member.
The company representative in the group is Winston Bumpus, the former Director of Open Technology and Standards at Novell and now Director of Standards Architecture at VMware.
Now most of the top virtualization members sit in the board: AMD, Broadcom, CA, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and VMware.
At this point the inclusion of Citrix seems almost inevitable.