The Open Group is considering the sale or closure of its two research units, industry sources say, as part of a general re- focusing of operations that’s been going on over the last year. The Open Group – the result of the merger back in February 1996 of the X/Open Consortium and the Open Software Foundation (CI No 2,857) has been struggling to reconcile its two halves over the last few years, and has been attempting to re-define its role under ex Barclays Bank IT supremo Joe De Feo, who joined six months after the merger. De Feo has been intent on making the Group buyer, rather than supplier, oriented, and last year instigated the so-called DialTone strategy, attempting to set up an internet equivalent to the private networking structures (such as SWIFT) that financial institutions have set up on proprietary networks (CI No 3,202). That strategy doesn’t fit well with the kind of technology-led projects that have been coming out of the research units which are based in Cambridge Massachusetts and Grenoble, France recently. Those include a high-speed Java compiler (CI No 3,305) and DARPA-related work. And the need for some of the Group’s original technology products, such as the Mach kernel-based OSF/1 operating system and Distributed Computing Environment DCE services, has now receded. Open Group spokesman Geoffrey Manton insisted that no decision had been taken regarding the future of the Labs, but he did admit that the task of effectively merging X/Open and OSF still has to be completed over two years after the deal was signed. But sources say the not-for-profit Open Group is looking for a buyer for the research units, which employ around 70 people, and if it doesn’t find one, might close them down. Manton said that the Group had gradually shed between 10% and 20% of its staff over the last year, leaving it with around 200. With further user-focused initiatives ahead, targeted particularly at large telecommunications providers, the question remains as to whether or not the nine major computer industry sponsors will willingly continue to pay out large sums of money for annual membership fees. The current sponsors are Digital Equipment Corp, Fujitsu Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Co, Hitachi Ltd, IBM Corp, NCR Corp, Novell Inc, Siemens Nixforf Informationssysteme AG and Sun Microsystems Inc. Last week the Group held its members meeting in San Diego, California, where 300 attendees turned up to discuss security, standards and compatibility issues of Network Computers.
รก
