------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews The Biweekly Newsletter For UniForum Members ------------------------------------------------------------ Issue Date: February 28, 1996 Volume X, Number 3 ------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews is written and published by UniForum's publications department. For information on articles in this issue or to contribute news to future issues, contact Richard Cole, (512) 292-1561, fax: (512) 292-1566, or email at 76402.1503@compuserve.com. Copyright 1996 by UniForum. All rights reserved. UNIX is a registered trademark, licensed exclusively by X/Open Co., Ltd. UniForum is a trademark of UniForum. Printed in USA. UniNews (ISSN 1069-0395) is published biweekly for $12 per year (membership dues) by UniForum, 2901 Tasman Dr., Suite 205, Santa Clara, CA 95054. 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Point your WWW client to http://www.uniforum.org. ------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents: o UniForum '96: Classics and New Models o Gerstner Sends Valentine to Open Systems o Unix Still the Answer, According to Platt o McNealy Proposes Next Phase In Client/Server o Mohan Calls Innovation the Name of the Game o Bigger and Better in 1997 o Internet the Focus of Coming Technologies o Data Warehousing Gets Real o For inquiries on the UniForum '97 Conference o UniNews Recruitment and Positions Wanted o Special WGS Linux Pro Offer for UniForum Members *Ad* o UniForum Member Benefits ------------------------------------------------------------ UniForum '96: Classics and New Models ------------------------------------- Event combined traditions with technology evolution By Jeffrey Bartlett One of the by-products of attending a major conference and trade show year in and year out is that it enables you to measure change. UniForum annually offers such a comparison of progress in the area of Unix and open systems. This year, calls for a "return to our roots" added an interesting twist to the unstoppable momentum of large-scale computing. Several prominent speakers felt that the intimate relation between Unix and open systems has been obscured recently, and they tried to correct some misperceptions. The rallying cry was sounded first and strongest by Michael Tilson, current UniForum president and CIO of the Santa Cruz Operation. "The term 'open' has been hijacked," he said in remarks preceding the opening day keynote speech. "Because 'open' is good, everyone labels whatever they sell as 'open.'" Tilson pointed to Microsoft as "the most egregious example" of this misappropriation. He went on to reassert the historic and technical associations of the term in the IT industry and promised, while implicitly giving advice to the Unix sector of the industry, that UniForum will not be "afraid to speak the 'U word': Unix." Three of the keynote speakers were on the same page as Tilson. Lew Platt, Hewlett-Packard CEO; Louis Gerstner, IBM CEO; and Alok Mohan, SCO CEO, all stressed that Unix has changed the face of computing and tied Unix systems to the "network-centric" focus of today's "business-critical" applications. Gerstner's declaration of faith brought a smile to some of us who remember when IBM was synonymous with proprietary. Only Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems CEO, did not spend much time pledging renewed allegiance to Unix, though he, too, credited the Unix community with driving "the networked age" now blossoming. McNealy focused on the World Wide Web and managed to sneak in a product demo of the Java-based "zero-administration client" Sun plans to sell. "Hardware is gonna be cool again," he said afterward. That afternoon, Eric Schmidt, Sun CTO, used the same demo in his plenary. If HP and SCO led the events of Wednesday, Sun took the center stage on Thursday. (Full reports on all the keynote addresses and plenary sessions follow in this issue.) *** What Was Hot These days it says nothing to note that the Internet and the Web were all over the place. Both the Webville "design your own home page" pavilion and the nearby Internet Experience drew steady streams of curious newcomers and experienced pros who wanted to log on while they were at the show. On top of that, the word intranet seemed to be on everyone's lips. With a two-day hands-on seminar on how to build a Web server and a pair of Internet conference tracks, one introductory and one advanced, there was plenty of substance to balance hype about the Net. Observations by our editorial staff and conversations with conference speakers and attendees revealed pervasive concerns on a series of issues that could be grouped under the heading of systems management. Managers as well as actual IS administrators cited these areas in particular: security; performance tuning; WAN management; and data access. Conference sessions on these topics were among the best attended. Even if there were no other worries (and of course there are many of those), this list would keep IS teams working overtime until next year's conference. Speaking of hot spots, a subsidiary event during the preconference drew surprising turnout: Tuesday's "Evening with Plan 9." More than 500 IT aficionados came to hear about this distributed operating system (and possible successor to Unix) from Dennis Ritchie, a leader of both projects. The reputations of Ritchie and Bell Labs still are magnetic. On the trade show floor, two other eye-catching venues drew crowds and comments. The "Generations" display of computers in the Data General booth, featuring exhibits from the Computer Museum of Boston and the Intel Museum, showed how far the industry has come in 20 or 30 years. Enterprise Live, a pavilion created by consultants Cambridge Technology Partners, offered a tour of the three-tier architecture of a mythical manufacturer called Clockworks. CTP took this virtual company from concept to show floor in less than six weeks, a project manager said. *** A Tradition of Change Another UniForum tradition was on display: the public announcement of a further agreement to streamline the industry standardization process. This year, the news was the collaboration and eventual merger between Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open Co. as the Open Group. Of particular significance to open systems professionals who want to know what their peers are doing is the creation of the Open Group Customer Council (OGCC), which combines the OSF End-User Forum and the X/Open User Council. OGCC members also will become members of UniForum, adding their knowledge of the industry and their own IT requirements to the association's critical mass of user input. (Look for full coverage of this new alliance in the April issue of UniForum's IT Solutions.) An hour after this announcement on Wednesday morning, just before the opening keynote address, the capacity crowd heard a long-time proponent of industry collaboration receive due recognition. Jim Bell, who has been on loan from HP to OSF as its interim CEO, received the UniForum Achievement Award for 1996. Several of his peers from other companies afterward characterized Jim, who also serves on the UniForum board of directors, as a "statesman" for the way he promotes the cause of open systems in a pragmatic manner, always looking for consensus. His selection for the award, which recognizes sustained contributions, was a popular one. Now that it's all over, everyone can get back to work on turning technologies into solutions that address problems in the real world. Soon enough we'll be counting the changes from this year to next. Planning for the 1997 conference begins on May 1. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Gerstner Sends Valentine to Open Systems ---------------------------------------- IBM CEO pledges cooperation with Unix community By Richard Cole In a special address appropriate for Feb. 14, Louis Gerstner, IBM chairman and CEO, spoke to a packed auditorium at UniForum '96, apologizing for IBM's proprietary past, praising the virtues of open systems and pledging a new union of Unix system suppliers. Gerstner pointed out that he was the first CEO of IBM ever to address a UniForum audience, and he admitted that IBM had fought open systems as a "bastion of closed, proprietary computing." In a firm but conciliatory tone, he spent much of his time stressing the importance of open technologies. He also delivered what sounded like regret concerning IBM's proprietary past. "We came to this party very late," he said, referring to IBM's slow start in open systems and related developments such as the Internet. "But once we got our head out of the sand, we moved fast, and we are proud of our contributions to the Unix environment." To anyone familiar with IBM's past efforts to dominate the industry, these remarks came as something of a surprise, but Gerstner did not hesitate to praise openness. "I'm here to talk about a truly open, universally connected world, a vision that is shared, perhaps created, by the entire Unix community." He added, "AIX and Unix are strategic to IBM." (AIX is IBM's Unix implementation.) According to Gerstner, Unix and open systems are key to the "next great phase" in the information technology industry, "network-centric computing." This includes client/ server environments, the Internet and corporate, internal intranets. "Networks are going to change the way computing is bought, sold and delivered," he predicted. "Computing will be purchased on a subscription or per-click basis." He cautioned that this shift will create "discontinuous change" with "new winners and losers," but he emphasized that the network-based future is both inevitable and rapidly approaching. Gerstner played to his UniForum audience in regard to developing network computing. "I have come to say, congratulations. Some of you were in the delivery room when the Internet was born. You have seen to its care and feeding when it wasn't quite the phenomenon it is today." He reminded everyone that "80 percent of Internet solutions are Unix-based" and that Unix is the leading platform for Internet tool development. *** Down to Business In addition, Gerstner made it clear that he saw open systems also as an effective way of doing business. After explicitly endorsing both open systems technology and the choices it provides to customers, Gerstner warned the audience about being too involved in its own achievements. "The open systems community is in love with its science and technology, but the network is about what people and institutions can do with it," he said. Customer solutions will have to be based on ease of use and open standards. The World Wide Web, he pointed out, only became popular with the advent of simple, easy-to-understand interfaces. "No important technology becomes ubiquitous until it is easy to use, affordable and conforms to standards." Gerstner criticized the current fragmentation in the Unix marketplace with its many interfaces at the application and user levels. "This is the single greatest threat Unix faces today. Our different systems force customers to learn and relearn. This is intolerable for customers and will be deadly for Unix." Without mentioning Microsoft by name, Gerstner alluded to "a new competitor" that could take advantage of a fragmented Unix community. "They don't call themselves open, but they are spinning a story of ease of use and shrink-wrapped, client/server consistency. The danger is real, and the signs are troubling." Only by standardizing interfaces and focusing on easy-to-use customer solutions, Gerstner warned, can the open systems community overcome the Microsoft challenge. He ended on a note of support and collaboration. "Our industry is a lot better at weddings than we are at marriages. But we are a lot smarter now. Open systems is about competitors working together." Reavowing IBM's belief in open systems, he added, "It is often said that converts are the truest believers. Believe me, we are the truest believers in open systems at IBM, and in Unix specifically. IBM will join in any effort with any vendor, with any customer around the world to pursue greater consistency and to give our products even more of an open identity." As analysts have pointed out, IBM is known for issuing "statements of direction" that do not necessarily translate into specific actions. The audience at UniForum followed Gerstner's remarks with interest. He encouraged them to watch what IBM actually does in the months and years to come with even closer attention. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Unix Still the Answer, According to Platt ----------------------------------------- HP CEO kicks off UniForum '96 By Cedric Braun The Unix community must continue its efforts to maintain momentum toward standardization and its preeminence in the open systems industry, according to Lew Platt, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. In his opening-day keynote address to an audience of over 2,200 on Wednesday, Platt challenged the UniForum '96 attendees to strengthen their focus on customer needs and "find new ways of delivering on the value propositions" that have made Unix a success. The four Unix value propositions that Platt discussed were its technical excellence as an enabling technology; the choice of running on more microprocessor architectures that any other operating system; its adaptability, portability and interoperability; and the thousands of applications it supports. "In short," he said, "Unix has made possible distributed computing." He emphasized that these benefits have "made this technology more successful than any of us would have imagined just a decade ago." He went on to say, "Without Unix and its advocates, there would have been no Internet, no World Wide Web and no glimpse of the information superhighway." Platt also asserted that Unix has changed the nature of computing and that its impact can be seen in two related phenomena: the open enterprise and the information infrastructure. In elaboration, he said that the most fundamental contribution of Unix to customers has been to help them to evolve their proprietary legacy systems into flexible IT architectures, which allow the users "to address today's business challenges while simultaneously preparing their organizations for an uncertain future." *** As an Encore Few keynoters would be willing to give a speech that encourages their listeners to rest on their laurels, and Platt did not. Instead, he asked, "What can Unix do for an encore?" Of the Unix community, he said, "We're a restless lot"--a remark clearly meant as a compliment. Having articulated the apparent paradox that "standardized interfaces encourage innovative implementations" and touting this as one of Unix's most important contributions to IT, Platt entered into one of the centerpieces of his address: the Information Utility. Using the analogy of the electric plug, he said that if we tried to draw the computing equivalent of this concept, the role of the plug "would be played by portability interfaces like UNIX '95 and interoperability interfaces such as X.25 or TCP/IP." As with the plug, he argued that these standards have made it possible to "innovate on either side of the interface." Platt offered his listeners both a look back and a look ahead. At one point, he was joined by Intel CEO Andy Grove in a realtime video conference over the Internet. Both men reminisced about past UniForum keynotes they had delivered--Platt in 1988 and Grove in 1994--in which they had warned about threats to the viability of Unix systems, including having too many incompatible versions of the operating system, vendor infighting and a sluggish standards process. They agreed that Unix had successfully overcome those challenges and has continued to thrive. Platt added that Unix has experienced growth far beyond what he had optimistically predicted in his previous keynote. Taking a metaphor from Grove's speech of two years ago, Platt insisted, "Instead of fortifying fortress Unix, we must build bridges." He ended his remarks by discussing how the Unix community can continue to balance "two very legitimate forces--competition and collaboration." Competition can help customers, because it creates innovation aimed at their emerging needs. Collaboration can also be good for customers, because it drives consensus toward a set of standard, transparent software interfaces. Platt concluded that this cycle of competition, innovation, collaboration and consensus "raises the bar" and moves technology forward. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ McNealy Proposes Next Phase In Client/Server -------------------------------------------- No surprise --it's the Net and Java By Richard Cole On Thursday, the second morning of UniForum '96 featured a keynote address by Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems. Well-known in the IT industry for a calculated outrageousness, McNealy delivered a free-wheeling speech on the state of the industry, his vision of future desktop computing and the latest developments in Java and client/server computing from Sun. Eschewing a business suit for casual slacks and a white polo shirt with the Sun logo and his e-mail address on the front ("I thought I'd nerd it up today for everyone"), McNealy cheerfully took the contrary position on a number of industry issues. While supporting the core efforts to standardize Unix systems, he argued against a single flavor of Unix. "Choice is good. Different environments have different requirements." He mentioned in passing that standards aren't set by standards bodies or "two little companies getting together," the latter a tweak at Wednesday's joint announcement of progress on consolidating Unix by Hewlett-Packard and the Santa Cruz Operation. *** No-Sweat Clients After his rambling general remarks (guaranteed, he said, to drive his marketing people crazy), McNealy shifted direction, to focus on the next phase of client computing. He noted that the once vaunted promise to "put a mainframe on every desktop" had come true. This, he said, simply creates "hairball" computers that shift the complexities of mainframe administration to individual users. He reasoned that it would be better to keep desktop and client computers as simply engineered, or "thin," as possible. This vision of thin clients led McNealy to Java, his announced topic and the one probably foremost in the minds of his audience. Developed at Sun, Java is Internet-based, platform-independent technology that allows, among other things, small applications ("applets") to run on and be downloaded from the Web. Since both software and data can be easily downloaded from servers with Java, a desktop computer may not need a diskette drive or hard disk storage. At this point, McNealy called a Sun technician to the stage and launched into a demonstration of a model of Sun's Java client, a system unit about the size of a one-volume dictionary. The unit had a regular-size monitor attached but no hard disk or diskette or CD-ROM drive. It supported a stripped-down operating system, which McNealy called "Java on bare metal." He claimed that it could be a "zero-administration client," far easier to administer and use than present clients. At the same time, he stressed that he wasn't proposing just another terminal, whether "dumb," X-based or Internet-specific like the one being developed by Oracle Corp. By downloading applets and data from the Internet, McNealy said, the Java client could handle most functions now performed by larger desktops. McNealy was careful to stress what Java was not. "It's not the universal answer. You don't want to write all your applications in Java." He pointed out that television didn't mean the extinction of radios, and in the same way, Java won't supplant existing technology. Rather, it will be an additional avenue for future developments. McNealy added that Sun will continue to distribute Java free of charge for the public. "We won't make money on Java, but we'll make money doing things on Java," he said, such as selling client and server hardware. His address gave UniForum attendees a preview of how Sun plans to accomplish that goal. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Mohan Calls Innovation the Name of the Game ------------------------------------------- SCO CEO wants consolidation and innovation behind Unix By Cedric Braun An introductory video designed to look like a 1920s newsreel touting the wonders of Unix technology greeted and amused the Friday morning audience at the final keynote address of UniForum '96. The video took some lighthearted jabs at the recent transfer of UnixWare and the Unix source code from Novell to the Santa Cruz Operation's headquarters in Santa Cruz, CA, thus serving to introduce the company's president and CEO, Alok Mohan. Mohan's topic was "Unix: Still the Best Business-Critical Server," and he began by pointing out that Unix is pervasive in both business and society today. He reminded attendees of its ubiquity by showing how practically every move one makes in the course of a day--from using computer networks to making phone calls to ordering a Big Mac--is supported by systems running Unix. This pervasiveness, he argued, has occurred because Unix is the best platform for innovation, due to its modularity and hardware independence. At the same time, Unix supports tens of thousands of business applications and remains the dominant platform for commercial databases, wide-area networks and the Internet; it also supports over 50 percent of all midrange units now being shipped, he claimed. Presenting what he referred to as a multivendor "Unix Industry Model," Mohan explained that progress is based on competition, innovation, research and development, and best-of-breed technology. He said that those characteristics make the model superior to the single-vendor model, because no one vendor can possibly achieve the lead in all areas for any significant period of time. Mohan made a few digs at a certain software company based in the Pacific Northwest. He suggested that the PC model touted by Microsoft is itself out of date. "Content must reside on the network," he insisted. In Mohan's view, the concept of "information at your fingertips," a Microsoft slogan, has outgrown the desktop. *** Innovate, Innovate Mohan added that the competition coming from that quarter is a good thing, because it alerts the Unix industry to the importance of innovation, which was the main thrust of his address. He said the Unix industry must accelerate its rate of innovation to meet the challenge of Windows NT and other products, and reminded his audience that innovation got Unix to where it is today. Mohan also predicted that consolidation in the number of Unix platforms will be necessary to increase the rate of innovation, though he was careful to insist that consolidation does not amount to the creation of a single Unix. Mohan also proposed a new Unix Industry Model, with fewer Unix platforms; more technology sources; a "level playing field"; and independent software vendors, relieved of porting to many platforms, adding value at high levels. In discussion afterward, Mohan admitted that the top tier of Unix vendors, including Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, are not likely to consolidate their Unix implementations. He said that SCO is in negotiations with other Unix suppliers and promised announcements in this vein within a few months. Speaking about the importance of partnering, Mohan stressed that industry partnerships ultimately lead to consolidation. He mentioned SCO's teaming with Hewlett-Packard to work on a next-generation Unix system technology stream, which was announced Wednesday at UniForum '96. He added that his company expects to take part in further partnering in the near future. He ended with the prediction that a consolidated Unix presence will form the foundation for continued growth in the Internet and other areas of information technology critical to business users. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Bigger and Better in 1997 ------------------------- Make your plans now to be back in San Francisco for UniForum '97-the premier event of UNIX and open technology including TCP/IP and the Internet. 1997 will be bigger and better with more of the hottest technologies, leading exhibitors, and high-powered educational sessions that have made UniForum the #1 open technology event in San Fransicso. UniForum '97 The Official Conference and Exposition for Open Systems Solutions Conference: March 10-14, 1997 Exposition: March 12-14, 1997 Moscone Convention Center; San Francisco, California Attention On-Line Users: Get the latest on all Softbank Comdex worldwide events: http://www.comdex.com Sponsored by UniForum, The International Association of Open Systems Professionals. Managed by Softbank Comdex Inc., producer of Comdex. UniForum: 2901 Tasman Dr. #205, Santa Clara, CA, 95054-1100 Softbank Comdex: 300 First Ave., Needham, MA 02194-2722 End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Internet the Focus of Coming Technologies ----------------------------------------- Schmidt champions Java as model By Don Dugdale For some observers, the Internet may be the most hyped technology of the 1990s, but for Eric Schmidt the opposite is true. "The Internet is actually the new paradigm," he told an audience of his plenary session on 21st Century Technologies at UniForum '96. "The Internet is probably the thing that will guide as many business and personal issues as you will face, pretty much for the rest of your professional life," he said. Schmidt, chief technology officer and corporate executive officer for Sun Microsystems, used that introduction to plunge into a description of how the so-called Internet revolution will dominate the rest of this decade. He used the second half of his talk to discuss Sun's Web-focused Java programming technology, virtually repeating the demo given by CEO Scott McNealy that morning. In speaking of the impact brought about by the Internet, Schmidt declared, "A few years ago people thought the Internet was an interesting communications mechanism, but it's now become the platform for computing." Among the consequences, he listed these points: o Internet service providers in the United States are trying to divide up the country's Internet service in much the same way that San Francisco's railroad tycoons divided up the United States in the nineteenth century. o Unix will have a central role in the Internet's development, because of its strong ties to both open systems and the Net's underlying protocols. o The Internet will almost certainly resist all attempts at pervasive censorship. "The Internet actually views censorship as a bug and routes around it," Schmidt said. "The Internet was designed to withstand nuclear attack. Do you think you can stop it?" he asked an amused audience. "The Internet is much bigger than people think," he added. "All of a sudden people are discovering that there are a lot of people out there in the world with a lot of diverse opinions, and they are all now accessible to you. Every country and every society is going to have to sit down and figure out how they want to react to that." o The greatest standards battles of the near future will be fought on this ground. "In 1996 it's going to be a fight between Netscape and its friends and Microsoft and its power," he predicted. "You could make a credible argument that either one will be extraordinarily successful and perhaps both. This has become the lightning rod for our industry. These battles that are going to occur competitively will in many ways affect the way we all compute." o Firewalls, proxy servers, cable modem technologies and "a model for trust" [secure systems] are among the areas where Internet-related needs should be served in the near future, Schmidt said. "It's now this incredible rush to solve all these different problems. In two or three years, as all these technologies play out, it's going to be very different for all of us." o The HTML standards battles will evolve into a single ubiquitous standard with lots of extensions. "That ubiquitous standard is almost certainly being set by the volume leader today, Netscape," he said. o Distribution of multimedia information to the home will be enabled by the coming of cable modems that connect to both television sets and home Ethernets. Schmidt provided his audience with a glimpse of the future, which will be driven in large part, he believes, by Java technology, for the reason that it provides executable content (data carries its enabling application with it). He also promised a solution for platform portability through dynamic compilation, which will mask compiling time within network transmission time. Schmidt didn't exactly take us into the next century, but he made it clear that the last years of this one will be interesting. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Data Warehousing Gets Real -------------------------- Plenary stresses opportunities, challenges By Peggy King Participants in the plenary session on data warehousing on Friday afternoon of UniForum '96 concluded that this application set is no longer just a pipe dream. Yet neither does it offer established solutions. Rebel Brown, president of the consulting firm Cognoscenti, moderated a panel consisting of executives from two vendor companies and two users who are implementing large-scale, second-generation data warehousing projects. Brown addressed some of the issues that make data warehousing difficult. "IT professionals are faced with the challenge of combining disparate information models and with making sure that their users are looking at the right data," she said. Vendor panelists Chris Erickson, president of Red Brick Systems, and Steve Sommer, vice president of marketing for Informix Software, gave overviews on how data warehousing has evolved from large-scale decision support to a distinct type of business application. While both men agreed that a database optimized for online transaction processing cannot deliver the performance desired for ad hoc queries, they took opposing views, predictably tied to each of their firm's type of technology, about whether a specialized database is needed for this task. Erickson, whose company sells a database tailored for data warehousing, delivered a word of caution to audience members planning to implement such a project. "A company needs to establish an entire information architecture designed around its own data access needs before it considers building a data warehouse," he said. Sommer discussed some of the types of data warehouses his company's customers have built. He argued that a "universal" database can be tuned and optimized to be a data warehouse as long as it has high-availability features, the ability to handle mixed data types and good performance for multidimensional analysis queries. *** Users and Their Struggles From the customer side were Sterling Makishima, information management data warehouse manager of Hewlett-Packard's worldwide customer support organization (WCSO), and Hugh Brownstone, vice president of strategic business development for IMS America, an information provider to the pharmaceutical industry. Makishima's team has implemented a worldwide data warehouse inside HP that runs on four geographically dispersed Unix servers and is queried by over 400 users. Brownstone participated in building a "data factory" that has grown to include 3.2 billion records of patient prescription data. Both of these early implementers faced technical and business challenges in scaling their first-generation data warehouses to the capacity and performance levels that their organizations require. For Makishima's organization, the principal goals for the new data warehouse architecture were to migrate to Unix servers from HP's corporate mainframe and to increase the timeliness of the information made available to users within the WCSO. The sheer size of the implementation--with tables as large as two gigabytes refreshed on a monthly basis--was a major challenge. IMS America built its existing data factory three years ago with a bank of Unix workstations to deliver prescription information by zip codes. This proved inadequate for a market that increasingly required information delivered on a per-patient level of granularity. In order to reach this next level, the company needed to add three terabytes of data storage. "We looked at all the existing products and found that our requirements overwhelmed all of them," said Brownstone. All panelists agreed that data warehousing is a steep hill to climb. Erickson advised customers to find a qualified systems integrator to help with the initial implementation, but he warned that some of the larger firms are just getting up to speed with the technology and may bring inexperienced staff to the project. Brownstone urged healthy skepticism toward vendor claims, recommending that users adopt the Missouri attitude: "Show me." Both customer panelists agreed that, despite all the data access and analysis tools now available, producing better reports is still the single benefit that end users appreciate the most. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ For inquiries on the UniForum '97 Conference -------------------------------------------- Call (617) 433-1804 or visit us at http://www.uniforum.org End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews Recruitment and Positions Wanted ---------------------------------------- For inclusion in the UniNews Classified Section, please provide the following information, being as specific as possible. If you do not want your name printed, please indicate in item No.1 and UniNews will receive replies and forward them to you. Please type or write legibly. Your classified may be edited for length or clarity. UniNews "Positions Wanted" classifieds are available FREE OF CHARGE to UniForum members only. Upon receipt of your material, we will publish your classified in the next TWO available issues of the biweekly UniNews. YOU MUST BE A MEMBER OF UNIFORUM TO PARTICIPATE 1. Your name Shall we print your name in UniNews? Your UniForum Membership # (if available) 2. Where Hiring Companies May Reach You (include phone, fax and e-mail) 3. Title and Description of the Job You Want 4. Geographical Preference 5. Professional Experience and Qualifications 6. Highest Grade or Degree Achieved, and Where: 7. Salary Range $ 8. Availability You may mail or fax this form to: Sandy Parker UniForum 2901 Tasman Drive, Suite 205 Santa Clara, CA 95054 (408) 986-1645. GOOD LUCK! End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Special WGS Linux Pro Offer for UniForum Members *Ad* ----------------------------------------------------- WGS Linux Pro plus a PC creates a personal Unix workstation and a powerful server! If you don't know what Linux is, it's time you did. Now that UNIX is a specification, Linux is what Unix has always been and what it is becoming! 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Call today for a complete list. 1 (800) 255-5620 or 1 (408) 986-8840 (outside U.S. and Canada) Comments or questions: contact Membership Services at UniForum *** Benefit in the Spotlight Tools & Toys For UnixWare UniForum now offers Prime Time Freeware's Tools Toys For UnixWare on CD-ROM at a discounted price to members. Tools & Toys is a collection of interesting freeware, ported to Novell's UnixWare operating system-- some very useful, some just plain fun. Call UniForum for more information or to receive a Products and Services Order Form. Price for general members: $45 Price for trial members: $60 End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ End UniNews.