OpenVision Inc, the unusual nine-month-old Pleasanton, California start-up with $25m in funding and a $12m revenue stream, which launched its unusual systems management concept at the end of last month (CI No 2,158), has picked up friends in high places. The company and its 15 systems management products, which will be integrated as Open V*OPSS by the end of the year, may become central to the Common Open Software Environment’s systems management efforts. Unix System Laboratories Inc president Roel Pieper, a member of the COSE anschluss, predicted that Unix System Laboratories Inc’s partnership with OpenVision will be able to drive the COSE effort in systems management forward by establishing common tools and technologies. OpenVision came to its debut armed with a licensing agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co, a reseller agreement with IBM Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc and on-going discussions with the Open Software Foundation, Tivoli Systems Inc and Unix Labs about technology exchanges, and a chair on X/Open’s network security committee and working relationships with Informix Software Inc and SHL Systemhouse Ltd. OpenVision’s technology is aimed at managing large geographically dispersed networks of heterogeneous computers with the degree of control comparable with that expected by mainframe users. Its system is derived from an architecture that integrates disparate products and applications around an event-driven core providing an automated alarm system activitated in anticipation of a user-defined problem and takes immediate action. The product strategy is combined with a fixed-price package of services that provide users with a no-shelfware commitment that OpenVision’s products will not gather dust but will be successfully installed and functional within a predictable budget.
