Been there, done that, is OpenVision Inc president and chief operating officer Geoff Squire’s assessment of the new kid on the client-server distributed systems management block, Platinum Technology Inc. Platinum said last week it would learn from OpenVisions’ mistakes ( CI No 2,667), and others have taken pot shots at the Pleasanton, California company since a recent bout of re-grouping there led to a string of rumours about its health. Squire has been hard on the campaign trail recently trying to snuff out any lingering concern and putting the changes into context. Since his arrival, Squire has re-jigged management, recently bringing in another Oracle Corp refugee, Richard Barker, as senior vice-president responsible for all research and development outside the US, and overhauled the company’s approach to the market. His first task was to break the prevailing notion that open systems and Unix are synonymous. OpenVision has now got a Windows NT and a NetWare strategy as a result. (The NT offering goes to beta next month). It has also broadened its Unix reach, covering OSF/1, UnixWare and AT&T System V.4 MP RAS as well as Solaris, HP-UX and AIX. The second was to re-establish the company’s technologies as point products. OpenVision had to come to terms with fact that users deploy technologies one at a time, they don’t generally swallow the whole caboodle in one sitting. So although integration, which accounted for 90% of 1994’s research and development resources, is important, Squire says that all of the products had to be re-positioned as individual technologies in their own right. OpenVision, Squire says, now offers distinct back-up, high availability, distribution, security and event management tools. Moreover, the problems that users are trying to address with OpenVision’s brand of management offerings are most often problems at large sites. The company is therefore focusing heavily on scalability. It currently offers support for between 800 and 1,000 remote sites in all of its products – it claims to have one 12,500-user distribution licence – and promises support for 10,000 users on all products by the middle of next year. Its integration strategy is centres on a common repository and user interface (Motif, Windows95), plus security, event management and policy management services. The firm is currently looking at adding new functions such as making its back-up software database-aware.
By William Fellows
The idea is to back up the actual database tables using SQL technology from its Computer Time acquisition rather than doing the usual hardware block copying. The software could be integrated by year-end. Squire says that OpenVision is definitely not in the framework business: in his view, that technology should be supplied by the hardware and operating system vendors. It’s the rapid application development technology and event management via OpenVision agents that really lowers the cost of operation, he argues. The products integrate with Karat, OpenView and Solstice network managers. Although the Open Network Computing-only house has Kerberos-based security, Squire says it is disappointed at the lack of Distributed Computing Environment take-up, but will go with a DCE flow, if that materialises. As far as object support is concerned there are several options. The first is to have its agents probe object databases – they support relational and legacy systems only right now. Second, it could use an object arch itecture such as Corba for its own communications. Third, and this is what the company is evaluating but hasn’t decided upon, is the option of using an object database as a repository. The 180-person OpenVision has 13 products in all, out with a claimed 1,000 customers. High availability, scheduling, event management and software distribution in its operations business. Auditing, authentification, access control and real-time security sniffing for OpenVMS in its security group. In addition there are a range of back-up, hierarchical storage management and archiving products, plus an Oracle
-based defragmentation system. Some 30% of its $20m-odd revenues is now achieved in Europe and the company plans to establish a joint venture in Japan shortly, presumably through one of its distributors there, Itochu Corp, Kanematsu KK and Nippon Steel Corp. Its long-expected deal with Sun Microsystems Inc that was being forged around the use of some OpenVision code in Solstice, never materialised because of changing requirements, though Squire says that the two are still working on a wider deal. Squire sees the competition as still either a Unicenter lock-in from Computer Associates International Inc, a framework from stock market darling Tivoli Systems Inc (we’ll port to it when it has 1m nodes, says Squire), mainframe-based Platinum, or Legent Corp, which it claims it never sees.
