Contenders say that their submissions for the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment Request For Technology are headed towards preliminary review on April 8 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and April 11 in Munich. Apparently, the list of 27 submissions that made the Foundation’s December deadline has been culled to about 14 reasonably significant proposals – with the duplicates and single-item products now excised. Groupe Bull is throwing its weight behind the joint IBM-Hewlett-Packard submission, and adding some of its own technology to the brew, including a standards-based System Management Services application programming interface and an Inference Engine that applies artificial intelligence to enterprise management. Siemens-Nixdorf says it’s climbing on the bandwaggon too and doesn’t want to talk about what it’s bringing to the party prior to a press conference that could be held this week. However, Hewlett-Packard Co says it’s working with the Germans to integrate OSI upper-layer communications protocols into the DME framework. Sources watching the IBM-Hewlett-Packard effort, which is slower than anticipated, aggravated perhaps by some Hewlett-Packard in-fighting between its own internal OpenView forces, whose stuff is the basis of the company’s Distributed Management approach, and its object management people, who are now in cahoots with Sun Microsystems on a separate Object Management Group submission. IBM’s contributions include a non-graphical user interface and technologies based on AIX, a fault-tolerant data engine and systems management applications. Since the Distributed Management submissions have yet to reach the actual evaluation stage, it was odd to read in last week’s InformationWeek magazine that the IBM-Hewlett-Packard submission was already a finalist in the Foundation run-off. The story’s claim can only create something of a public relations flap for the Foundation, whose Request process has been attacked as biased towards its founders, especially so if the IBM Hewlett Bull Siemens Nixdorf camp eventually prevails.
