Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp, Japan’s state-controlled telecommunications giant, has joined the Open Software Foundation as of this week, it was announced in Tokyo on Tuesday. Foundation president David Tory claimed that NTT’s move was indicative of the growing influence of major users in the open systems movement. Nippon Telegraph made clear its intention to move to open systems three years ago when it rallied major vendors to help specify its Multi-vendor Integration Architecture, calling in Fujitsu Ltd, NEC Corp, Hitachi Ltd, IBM Japan Ltd, Digital Equipment Japan and its NTT Data Communications systems integrator. Nippon Telegraph plans to use the Multivendor Integration Arechitecture specification in procurement for some government systems – where a relational database is required.
