Affiliate News-Taiwanese Affiliate Pushes Open Systems Projects

The Chinese Open Systems Association (COSA), based in Taipei, Taiwan, is one of UniForum's most active international affiliate groups. Currently with 65 organizational members from industry and government, as well as 500 individual members, COSA is a staunch advocate of open systems, with active projects in both government and private industry.

Founded in 1991, COSA has been affiliated with UniForum since 1992. Members include government users, individuals, college professors and those from private industry, says COSA President Ho-Ming Huang. Corporate members include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Tatung, and Acer Corp. of Taiwan. Two government-funded institutes - the Institute of Information Industry and the Industrial Technology Research - are strong supporters of COSA, both working with local companies to spread technological knowledge.

"Our first mission is to promote the concept of open systems, and our second is to collect information from the information community and do some research so that we can adopt international open systems and do some localization," Huang says. "Our third mission is to support our members in the community in implementing open systems."

In 1994, the group's theme was "Win With Open Systems," encouraging industry to increase their productivity and improve competitive advantage by implementing open systems. A consulting group was formed, which received contracts from the National Science Council totaling $30,000 to help government bodies adopt open systems standards. The consultants helped agencies decide on a client/server architecture and helped set specifications required for their procurement.

Also in 1994, COSA influenced government spending bodies to adopt open systems specifications. Based on that adoption, the government published a white paper proposing that all government organizations should follow common open systems specifications. "Government procurement has shifted from proprietary to open systems," Huang says, currently amounting to about 70 percent open systems purchases, up from 20 percent five years ago. "Also, I think due to the effort of COSA, many companies have committed to open systems."

The group is continuing to sponsor seminars and exhibitions, including more than 50 seminars last year, as well as bimonthly interest group meetings.

This year COSA has a new project - a Video on Demand Testbed - a $3 million project to allow TV viewers to select their programming. Program and content providers, the cable TV businesses, system providers, video server providers, and network equipment and set-top providers are working with COSA on the project, which begins Feb. 1 and will take a year and a half to develop.

In addition, COSA is cosponsoring, with the National Center of High-Performance Computing, a new conference, High-Performance Computing Asia (HPC Asia), to be held next September. An estimated 1,000 attendees from more than 10 countries will attend the event.

Contact Huang at HO-MING_HUANG@hp9801.deskhp.com