Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp has issued an outline document on Multi-Vendor Integrated Architecture, prepared by its subsidiary NTT Data Systems in conjunction with five other firms Fujitsu Ltd, IBM Japan, Nippon DEC, NEC Corp and Hitachi Ltd, and plans to use it as a procurement specification for its NTT mainframes – the DIPS11 machines – which it has to get manufactured by subcontractors because it is forbidden to manufacture such things itself: the document provides guidelines such as an Applications Interface for easy transfer of software between machines; a system connection interface for connecting different machines; and a human interface for providing easy screen displays and operation methods; last year NTT sought members to join the research group working on the mixed architecture, and the selected five partners in September; the document provides a proposal for integration of systems from the major manufacturers, such as Systems Application Architecture from IBM, but the Multivendor Integrated Architecture will remain the proprietary intellectual property of NTT.
