Late last month, a group of high-powered computer executives and industrial-strength users met for three days in a hotel room in San Francisco. The occasion was Nina Lytton’s Open Systems Initiative seminar, the first of what is undoubtedly destined to become an annual industry event. For those unacquainted with Nina, she is the winsome ex-Yankee Group analyst that earlier this year went out on her own to start up her own brand of industry watchdog, The Open Systems Advisor. This Open Systems Initiative thing was Nina’s first outing under her own banner and she certainly proved she is able to to get the top brass in one room and make them pay attention. From the vendor side, there were folks there like David Tory, president of Open Software Foundation; Larry Dooling, president of AT&T’s Unix Software Operation; Geoff Morris, president of X/Open; Ralph Ungerman, president of Ungerman-Bass; Dean Morton of Hewlett-Packard; Gil Williamson, president of NCR; Rich McGinn, president of AT&T Computer Systems; Bill Heffner, vice-president of the Systems Software Group at DEC; Eric Schmidt, vice-president of the General Systems Group at Sun Microsystems; Paul Maritz, vice-president of Advanced Operating Systems at Microsoft; and Cyril Yansouri, president of Network Computing Group at Unisys. What was interesting about their attendance, perhaps, was that most of them were actually participating. They didn’t just fly in and fly out, give a speech and depart in a cloud of dust, trailing their retinues. There was some of this, of course, compliments of IBM and the Open Software Foundation, but a lot of these guys actually carved two days, at least, out of their schedules to attend. And they didn’t spend their time out in the hall on the phone. They were actually in the hall listening – and taking notes. The users that came and filled 60% of the seats represented some real money as in Bank of America, Scott Paper, DHL and American Airlines. Their primary message to the vendors seemed to be that interoperability with installed systems is what they really want and that open systems embrace a lot more than just Unix. They came to hear the vendors explain their various strategies for implementing open systems. Maybe next time around, the vendors can oblige them a bit more clearly. – Maureen O’Gara