But before a specification can be accepted as a standard by the group, the members of the submitter team must guarantee that they will bring a conforming product to market within a year.

Other private companies or open source groups are encouraged to produce conforming products and OMG is attempting to develop mechanisms to enforce true interoperability.

The Technical Meetings provide a neutral forum to discuss, develop and adopt standards that enable software interoperability.

Founded in 1989 by eleven companies (including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, American Airlines, iGrafx, and Data General), OMG's initial focus was to create a heterogeneous distributed object standard.

The VSIPL family of libraries has been implemented by multiple vendors for a range of processor architectures, including x86, PowerPC, Cell, and NVIDIA GPUs.

Late 2012 early 2013, the group's Board of Directors adopted the Automated Function Point (AFP) specification.

On March 27, 2014, OMG announced it would be managing the newly formed Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).