Name: Donna Van Fleet Age: 48 Place of Birth: Danville, PA Current Position: Vice President, AIX Systems Development, IBM Corp. Years in Current Position: 5 Years in the Industry: 27 Car She Drives: 1991 Mercedes Benz 300 Favorite Non-work Activities: Hanging out with her husband Jim and 13-year-old son Jon. Pet Open Systems Peeve: "The good news about open systems is that it takes a lot of multivendor collaboration toward a common goal. That's also the bad news, because it takes a lot of meetings to make that happen. It's slow going at times and I know that frustrates our customers." On UniForum: "I'd like to see more of the novice end users become engaged with UniForum as a way to help them understand the value of open systems, and as a way for us to understand what more they want from us. I really want UniForum to become an end-user body."
In February 1990, International Business Machines Corp. found itself in a peculiar position. Sometime in the late 1980s, an interesting but experimental concept called open systems had come into its own. It was not led by the mainframe giant but by desktop manufacturers, and it was based on AT&T's UNIX operating system. Left in the starting blocks years before, IBM raced to produce its own UNIX workstation, the RISC System/6000. The month of the product launch, a 22-year IBM veteran with no UNIX background named Donna Van Fleet was tapped to head development of IBM's version of UNIX, AIX (for Advanced Interactive Executive). Although an IBM team in Austin, TX, had been hard at work on AIX and the RS/6000 for some time, it was Van Fleet's introduction to open systems. "I arrived in Austin during announcement week without a clue about what a UNIX was or what an RS/6000 was," Van Fleet recalls. "The number of people at IBM who had experience with UNIX or open systems then was limited to a wonderfully brilliant, far-sighted, enthusiastic, but small group here in Austin."
Why did she want the job? "I have a high affinity for going to the part of the map that says 'Here be dragons,'" she explains. "At that time, IBM getting into UNIX seemed like a pretty big dragon that we would have to slay."
The challenge was obvious, and energizing. "It was becoming more and more clear that this was a very important project for IBM's future," she says. "IBM would have a significant challenge in convincing the industry that we were serious about open systems. I do enjoy big challenges and things where the win is not obvious. The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that there is a high probability that what we want to do might not happen. It gets me going."
For a mainframe careerist, the exposure to open systems was like taking a cold shower. "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that I had the opportunity to join this group and really get involved in open systems," she says. "The biggest challenge for me personally was understanding the culture of open systems. But that was short-lived. I did a lot of listening and it became very intuitive why it was right. It's not a hard sell to make."
Van Fleet brought years of background in programming development with her to her UNIX job. At the same time, it was obvious that open systems meant adopting a new mentality. "I came in with a clean sheet of paper in my mind and for the first couple of months I just listened to how it worked," she relates. "I knew that it was not a matter of just assuming that it employed the same business model that we used for the proprietary business. I knew that was not the model."
The next biggest challenge for Van Fleet was convincing the industry that IBM was serious about open systems. "Universally, there was skepticism, and possibly even cynicism on the part of some folks," she notes. "I spent a lot of time with consultants, analysts, the press, and customers answering hard questions and asking them to tell me what their measures of openness were and ensuring that AIX met them. They asked me a lot of hard questions about our commitment. I asked them about their measure of openness, and then I made sure that AIX delivered on that." The mainframer had become an open systems advocate.
As a new college graduate, Van Fleet's main objective was to make money fast, to repay her student loans. With no programming experience, she joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, as a systems programmer at the height of the mainframe boom, when IBM's System/360 ruled the roost in the data processing world. She worked on development of the MVS operating system, which was still on the drawing boards. Although it was a good way to get started, Van Fleet never envisioned herself as a programming guru. "I knew that I did not want to spend my entire career being only on the technical side of things," she says. "I was very interested in the business, management, and marketing aspects."
After a year and a half, she became a technical writer, producing logic manuals for the company's field workers. "I thought it was great writing logic manuals," she says. "It's probably about the driest thing in the world you can write about, but I loved it." Five years later she began a series of management jobs-first managing a group of technical writers, then MVS systems programmers, then system testers-moving at the same time through levels of middle management.
After 12 years with the company, Van Fleet took a year's leave of absence when her son was born. When she went back to work in 1982, she moved into the engineering laboratory, managing microcode development and test. Three years later she got what she considers one of her best assignments. She was asked to become an end user, heading up information systems support for IBM's mid-Hudson Valley manufacturing facilities. "That was a wonderful experience because I really got to do what our customers do, which is to use the computers to get work done," she says. "I got to sit on the other side of the product and be responsible for running IBM's manufacturing facilities and the financial applications seven days a week, three shifts a day, and to really see what it was like to use IBM computers. I think every development lab person should have the opportunity to sit in the customer's seat and experience using these systems to get their business done."
Van Fleet's first executive position was as director of IBM's database products, IMS and DB2, at the company's Santa Teresa Laboratories in San Jose, CA. From there, she received her appointment to head AIX development in Austin.
Although individual IBM salesmen who know more about the AS/400 may try to sell that system over the RS/6000, there's no companywide policy to favor AS/400 sales, Van Fleet asserts. "To the contrary, all of the IBM portfolio is sold to that which best suits the situation," she says. "We believe all our products have a part to play in the industry, and they all have an audience and a customer set."
AIX development has continued. Late last summer IBM introduced version 4, a symmetric multiprocessing edition of the operating system. Version 4 also contains ease-of-use enhancements such as a faster, more intuitive installation, a desktop based on the multivendor Common Desktop Environment (CDE), and visual system management with a drag-and-drop object-based format. Applications are being ported to the new version, which is designed to be binary compatible with older applications. "We are working very assertively with all the application providers to ensure that they have given thumbs up to their customers and are also exploiting the multiprocessing capability," Van Fleet says.
New capability is set to be added to AIX at several points during 1995. Six-way and eight-way multiprocessor scalability will be added. Also ease of use will be enhanced. "One of our guiding principles now is to make AIX a much more intuitive, even fun-to-use tool for customers," says Van Fleet. "So you'll see the addition of human-centered interfaces such as speech, audio, and video, as an integrated part of the interface set." Integrated solutions such as Internet connectivity will also be added, so that users without an Internet registration need only click on an Internet icon to bring up a registration facility. "These are solutions that make it straightforward to customers as a tool that does what they want to do, as opposed to a piece of a puzzle they have to put together," Van Fleet says.
IBM also plans to add a turnkey entry-level server, allowing AIX to plug-and-play with any of the common desktop machines-IBM, Apple, Microsoft-based, or Novell-based. "It's a server solution for high client affinity with heterogeneous client environments," she says. "While one can do all that today with AIX, the advancements in 1995 will be an integrated solution rather than a set of parts that a customer today would have to put together. Integrated solutions is a big theme." In addition, systems management tools on AIX are to be integrated. Finally, for application programmers, object frameworks and tools will be introduced.