On the one hand, this seems like a somewhat arbitrary name change – from System Defintion Model to Service Modeling Language. And the use of the term “Service” instead of “System” seems sketchy to me.
On the other hand, you gotta love this line from the press release: “The group plans to submit the draft specification to an industry standards organization later this year.” Given the companies involved in “the group” – MSFT, IBM, BEA, Sun, Dell, BMC, Cicso, Intel, HP and EMC – you gotta think SML has a bright future.
Here’s hoping that publishing the SML spec is the first step in a public-workshop-based revision process, a la the Web Services Protocol Workshops.