X/Open Co Ltd, in conjunction with Sigma System, the company that emerged from the Ministry of International Trade & Industry-sponsored Sigma Project, sponsored the International Symposium for Open Systems last week in Tokyo. Speakers included Dr Toshiyasu Kunii, Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of Tokyo, and Dick O’Donnell, director of information technologies at Harris Corp. O’Donnell is also an executive member of X/Open’s User Council. Harris Corp’s information technology department has around 150 employees, with MVS, VM, Unix and MS-DOS expertise, supporting a centralised mainframe system and world-wide voice and data network. Harris’s internal experience with open systems dates from 1987 when the company committed to X/Open Portability Guide 3 standards and resolved to seek X/Open-compliant vendors and products and the forging of alliances with strategic vendors.
Pilot project
In 1989, these were formalised in a formal procurement policy and an application development pilot project. One of the most demanding of Harris’s standard contract terms involves the vendor’s commitment to provide, under escrow if necessary, a copy of the product’s source code with the purchase. O’Donnell cited a case study within Harris of a home-grown open systems environment known as AP:Elite, an accounts payable system, which replaced a third party mainframe-3270 dumb terminal system. The system was developed to work with multiple databases, including Ingres, Oracle and Btrieve, various local nets such as NetWare and TCP/IP, and a variety of computers. Benefits realised varied from site to site, but ranged from a doubling of throughput per week at a cost more than halved, through to a headcount reduction of one third. The system was also sold outside the company, and overseas. Harris Corp’s current mix of home-grown to purchased products is around 80:20 but over the next three to five years, O’Donnell expects this ratio to be reversed. He summed up the benefits of open systems to Harris as including a reduction in operating costs of between 60% and 75%, functional staff reductions of between 20-50%, software maintenance savings of between 50% and 60% and cost avoidance in the region of $250m to $300m, this being based on the cost per MIPS of a mainframe, $44,300, compared with a workstation server of $761 per MIPS. Harris Corp has a very minor presence in Japan, selling primarily chips through distributors. O’Donnell was keen to correct the impression that Harris is primarily a defencecontractor, citing its $1,700m US Air Traffic Control system past.
