First Open Group Meeting Charts New Course

X/Open and OSF Consolidation Takes Form

Some 300 representatives from X/Open Co. Ltd. and the Open Software Foundation (OSF) member companies met Mar. 11-15 in San Francisco to hear firsthand how The Open Group will operate and what impact the new organization's programs will have on them. The Open Group was recently formed by combining X/Open and OSF memberships.

In their introductory remarks on the opening day, Jim Bell, interim president and CEO of OSF, and Geoff Morris, president and CEO of X/Open, said that the mission of The Open Group was to increase the compatibility and interoperability of open systems through a collaborative process. The goals included clarifying customer requirements; facilitating research and development of technology in response to these requirements; endorsing and promoting specifications for de facto standards; testing and branding products to meet these specifications; and articulating to customers, vendors and the public the benefits of open systems.

A more detailed description of The Open Group's mission and goals will be found in the April issue of UniForum's IT Solutions where a new column, "Inside The Open Group," debuts

The first day of the meeting was dedicated to presentations from The Open Group's key staff directors and chairs of The Open Group's councils. These talks were called vision statements and included remarks by user representatives Alain Robert of Elf Aquitaine in Paris and Bill Estrem of 3M in St. Paul, MN. The talks gave an important introduction to the new Open Group Customer Council (OGCC), which will create a new model for bringing business-user requirements to the fore. The OGCC will establish a business requirements committee made up of representatives from customers, software vendors and The Open Group board and staff, including the CEO. The committee's job will be to propose the five most important business requirements for members and to delegate these requirements to management subcommittees.

These working groups will be either business requirement groups (BRGs) which are expected to be long-term bodies that deal with multiple related issues, or task groups chartered for short terms (perhaps up to a year) to focus on a single task. The BRGs work to develop and publish a program plan based on a needs analysis and a timetable. They also establish task groups as needed and report back regularly to the OGCC. BRG members come from The Open Group's council members with an Open Group facilitator.

Other opening statements made during the day included the independent software vendor (ISV) vision, presented by Karl Klessig of Enterprise Solutions, of Westlake, CA; the technical vision, given by CTOs Mike Lambert of X/Open and Ira Goldstein of the OSF Research Institute; the market vision from Peter Shaw of OSF and Allen Brown of X/Open; and the process vision by Dick O'Donnell of Harris Corp. in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Newly formed BRGs on security, the information highway, architecture and interoperability met later the same day to put the new process into effect.

The following four days were given over to presentations, seminars and organizing meetings that included a kickoff meeting for new task forces as well as updates on new technical research areas such as Java and DCE Web. Richard Jaross, UniForum's executive director, gave an address that spoke about the new ways UniForum is already cooperating and assisting The Open Group. As previously reported in UniNews, the first tangible result of UniForum's cooperation has been to make all OGCC companies new End-User Corporate Sponsors of UniForum. UniForum will also provide blocks of association memberships to OGCC company staff. New cooperative ventures are already in the works and include technical book publishing, user requirements research and a value-added Open Systems Products Directory. UniForum members will hear more about each of these initiatives in future issues.

The Open Group's major event was the formal dinner at the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where members gathered to honor a number of council members who had provided unstinting service to OSF and X/Open. Ted Hanss from the University of Michigan was singled out for his outstanding leadership. After the awards, the evening's keynoter was introduced by UniForum's president, Michael Tilson of SCO, who took the opportunity to reemphasize that UniForum intends to provide as much encouragement and programmatic cooperation as possible to The Open Group. He then turned the dais over to his boss, SCO president and CEO, Alok Mohan, who made an eloquent statement of support to users from his standpoint as a vendor. Echoing his remarks made at UniForum '96, Alok again stressed the need for innovation to be coupled with collaboration. There is no one company that can provide technological supremacy in all areas, he argued, so the proprietary model lacks the benefits of the open systems model which is based on shared standards and development.

Subsequent open meetings of The Open Group councils are set for June in Barcelona and September in Washington, DC.