Already a well-known supporter of open systems, the Commission of the European Communities is planning to buy servers, workstations, portables, X-terminals and software under a contract that will be worth up to $10m a year through the 1990s, according to Walter De Bcker, director of informatics at the Commission. Whilst the Commission plumped for the OSF/Motif graphical user interface some time ago, the operating system and distributed computing environment will not be decided upon until the evaluation stage. Plans were published in a report called Guidelines for an Informatics Architecture last week. The Informatics Directorate, which has computer centres in Brussels and Luxembourg, plans to have 16,000 users on 15,000 workstations by 1995. The Commission currently has an eclectic mix of hardware from NCR Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co, Bull SA, Sun Microsystems and ICL. Apart from these companies, IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co are also expected to make bids.
