As our sister publication Unigram.X hinted a couple of weeks ago, open systems standards and technology development organization The Open Group (TOG) has gone outside of the industry and recruited Barclays Group IT supremo Joe De Feo to be its new president and CEO. De Feo, a highly influential supporter of open systems strategies who currently represents end users on TOG’s board, will replace interim CEO Jim Bell in October; Bell is director of open systems alliances at Hewlett-Packard Co and has been on extended loan to TOG while it sought a permanent chief executive. UK-based standards organization X/Open Co Ltd and technology development organization the Open Software Foundation were merged under the Open Group umbrella organization in February this year in an attempt to streamline their respective specification and technology development processes. It’s been clear for sometime there would be little change in either’s activities – apart from consolidation of their respective user and marketing operations – until a new chief brings his will to bear on the proceedings (CI No 2,857). De Feo, Barclays’ high profile IT chief of the last seven years, says his immediate concerns will be to reduce members’ costs by continuing the process of consolidation among the industry’s assorted vendor, user and technology consortia; and to raise the level of Microsoft Corp’s participation. De Feo’s first task brings to mind that ‘SUPERconsortium’ idea mooted about last year (CI Nos 2, 719, 2,797, 2,803), though he declined to identify the groups TOG is negotiating with apart from one in his own backyard; SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. As far as Redmond’s participation is concerned, all De Feo will say is that TOG is discussing other levels of membership for Microsoft above the basic card it currently carries. Both tasks feed De Feo’s idea that through its technology development and standards specification processes TOG should become a catalyst for the convergence of future technologies on the supply side to meet users’ requirements. His model is the creation, standardization and adoption of web and internet technologies. Although TOG doesn’t currently count Netscape, WC3, internet service providers or most of the telecoms industry as paid-up supporters, De Feo is regarded by TOG members we spoke to as the right man to bring consumer electronics, retail, entertainment and telecoms types into the organization. TOG’s OSF arm was responsible for creating the OSF/1 Unix variant once used by IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp, the Motif graphical interface for Unix and Distributed Computing Environment middleware. It’s currently working on ‘clean room’ Java implementations. X/Open has defined standards for application portability, connectivity, security and is currently keeper of the Unix trademark and Spec 1170 application programming interfaces.
