Digital Equipment Corp is the latest beneficiary of British Telecommunication Plc’s giant BoaT office automation in British Telecom project, to reveal itself. It has won a contract to provide a system for staff in British Telecom’s new London zone which takes the M25 motorway ring as its boundary. The project, one of three initial launch installations underway at British Telecom, will connect up senior managers working in the Business and Personal Communications Division, using DECsystem 5000/5100 systems running Uniplex, Pathworks for Ultrix, Message Router and Quantec’s QED Office as the personal computer mail agent. The project has been designed initially for 100 users, although the DEC installation is likely to support up to 2,000 users in the future. DEC’s project takes its place beside two other launch installations carried out by IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co – but according to Graham Oliver, British Telecom’s BoaT programme manager, other Unix suppliers will also be used.
Two strands
There are two strands to BoaT: the first is to integrate and incorporate the existing office automation system, which runs on IBM mainframes, Unix systems and VAXes; while the second strand aims to add around 30,000 users over the next three years. For this it plans to concentrate on Unix-based servers, and is using its three initial suppliers to make sure that everything is right. According to Oliver, IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard are working closely with each other on the project. Making open systems your philosophy is challenging, said Oliver, but the three suppliers have been very co-operative with us and each other. The aim is to have the same software portfolio on each box, and while Uniplex and Oracle – which looks like being the preferred database – is available on all three, other components, such as Hewlett-Packard’s Open Mail, are having to be converted for the other systems. The fact that all three are Open Software Foundation members is a coincidence, according to Oliver: British Telecom is specifying X/Open’s Portability Guide Release 3 compliance for the software environment to help conversion activities between the various systems. One of the challenges we face is to harmonise the existing Unix machines but we won’t concentrate everything on three suppliers. Character and graphics-based personal computers will also be included in the scheme on a client-server basis, enabling the continued use of MS-DOS word processing packages linked up to Unix hosts. Despite talk of cutbacks last year when the project, initially codenamed Coast, was renamed, Oliver claims that the complete system, incorporating British Telecom’s UK and international operations, could eventually connect up 50,000 or more users. Networking is partly based on British Telecom’s company-wide private InterMail X400 network, provided by the TymNet division, and eventual migration to full Open Systems Interconnection is an objective.
