A core group of network and systems management application houses, disenchanted with the slow rate of progress of system vendors, have come together to nail down the basic criteria they need to be able to sell product, forming a Management Integration Consortium. The group, which includes companies such as Peregrine Systems Inc, Remedy Corp, Isicad Inc, Ki Research and Legent Corp, have drafted a charter they hope to formalise at the consortium’s first meeting – May 5 in Las Vegas. The consortium, whose organisers would rather be off doing their real jobs, is not aimed at solving any of the grand problems of management integration, merely at kickstarting some basic standards. The core curriculum includes common storage for data, a simple and lightweight applications programming interface for data access, common event management and a generic portability scheme between management systems. Apparently there are submissions already in the works covering the first three items but they can’t be regarded as formal submissions until the consortium is actually created, officials elected, steering committees sanctioned and work groups set up. Sun Microsystems Inc, NetLabs Inc and Cabletron Systems Inc are expected to be among the founders and IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co are said to be still evaluating the level of their participation, though they will probably join in some fashion if only to know what’s going on. The group has also attracted a few superusers such as Martin-Marietta Corp, US West Inc and Alcatel NV and will also apparently include Accugraph Inc, Ungermann-Bass Inc, Computer Associates International Inc, GTE Federal Systems Inc, SHL Systemhouse Inc, Andersen Consulting, Tivoli Systems Inc and OpenVision Inc. Discussions leading to the consortium’s organisation are said to have been going on for more than a year during which time the system vendors have failed to make much progress with needed applications programming interfaces. Interim chairman Eric Olinger of Peregrine Systems, for instance, said the Distributed Management Environment was locked up in the Open Software Foundation and that the code was two years away from his desktop and another year away from having applications. The consortium hopes to have the initial contributions published by June 1 and to hold the first regular meeting of the Steering Committee, to be composed of its founders, by August.
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