The PowerOpen Association has just opened an office on the US West Coast, and it will follow this up by opening its European headquarters in early March. Compagnie des Machines Bull SA’s senior Unix sales and marketing man Jean-Pierre Glachant, who has an IBM Corp background, is rumoured to have been appointed to the top job in Paris, and offices here will probably be located at Bull headquarters. The West Coast site will initially be centred at Apple Computer Inc’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, but will move elsewhere once a more independent location is found. Meanwhile, the Association says it should be ready to announce the PowerOpen application binary interface at the UniForum show in March, and will set an independent software vendor programme in motion by the late summer. It is also in discussions with X/Open Co Ltd about becoming a test centre for XPG4-conformancy. The Association expects to close a deal with Aptest Applied Testing & Technology to license its test suite this week, and says it would use the technology for both XPG4 and PowerOpen branding – any XPG4-conformant product would be 90%-compliant with PowerOpen anyway, it declared, because the PowerOpen application programming interface already conforms to XPG4. The test suite should be available for use by the late summer or early autumn.
