And in response to last week’s item on the due process and progress of the Distributed Management Environment, (CI No 1,643), Groupe Bull’s Ashley Stephenson, from the company’s corporate strategy and planning group – responsible for all things Open Software Foundation at the moment – confirmed, as we suspected, that a report in InformationWeek magazine citing the existence of a shortlist of preferred technologies, is premature. However Stephenson admits that there are some six significant submissions, which embrace an overall base technology, plus others that will likely be pulled into the finished offering. The ranks of the four-company effort, which aside from Bull includes IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Siemens-Nixdorf, is likely to grow with the addition of technology from other firms over the next few months. The Open Software Foundation, which has been criticised in the past for favouring submissions predominantly from its founder members in its other technology requests, is now smarter and wiser, says Stephenson, who expects the final cut of Distributed Management Environment to include technology from independent software vendors as well from other outside suppliers. Indeed he is confident that independents will determine the success of submissions. Bull, which is contributing a Systems Management Services application programming interface to the effort, says the technology incorporates established standards, as well as anticipated future standards such as X/Open Co’s proposed interface to management services.
