The Open Group

The Open Group is a vendor- and technology- neutral industry consortium with a vision of Boundaryless Information Flow that will enable access to integrated information within and between enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability. The group sees enterprise architecture to be the key catalyst that organizations can use to make progress towards its vision.

The Open Groups members come from all over the world and include some of the largest IT buyers and vendors, representing both government and commercial enterprises: Capgemini, Fujitsu, Hitachi (company), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NEC Corporation, Sun Microsystems, US Department of Defense, NASA, and many others.

= Services and Programs =

Certification The Open Groups approach is Making Standards Work . They have an extensive experience and a long track record in facilitating consensus to develop standards, including defining new standards, evolving existing ones, building consensus and providing support services, and developing best practices. They recognize the importance of assured conformance through certification and operate a number of [http://www.opengroup.org/certification/ certification programs], including certification for Common Operating Environment (COE) Platform, CORBA, Directory, IT Architects, Linux Standard Base, POSIX, Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), TOGAF, Unix, and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). The Open Group is also the owner of the UNIX trademark.

The organizations flagship program is the recently launched IT Architect Certification program, which defines global standards for measuring the skills and experience of IT architects and for the operation of IT architecture practices within enterprises.

Another very popular program is certification of TOGAF practitioners, where The Open Group certifies professionals in the use of the TOGAF Architecture Development Method (ADM) for producing open architectures. TOGAF, The Open Group Architecture Framework, was developed by The Open Groups Architecture Forum. It is a comprehensive foundation architecture and method for conducting enterprise information architecture planning and implementation. TOGAF is free to organizations for their own internal noncommercial purposes.

Member Forums With CIOs being pressed to do more for less, The Open Group provides a platform for its members to discuss their requirements, work jointly on guiding development and adoption of industry standards, and confront major barriers to enterprise integration. Based on their area of interest, members can join one or more [http://www.opengroup.org/forums/ Forums] that are semi-autonomous. The Open Group Forums include: [http://opengroup.org/architecture/ Architecture Forum], [http://www.opengroup.org/ges/ Grid Enterprise Services Forum], [http://www.opengroup.org/idm/ Identity Management Forum], [http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/ Jericho Forum],[http://www.opengroup.org/messaging/ Messaging Forum],[http://opengroup.org/management/ Enterprise Management and Quality of Service Forum], [http://www.opengroup.org/platform/ Platform Forum],[http://www.opengroup.org/rtforum/ Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum], [http://www.opengroup.org/security/ Security Forum], and [http://www.opengroup.org/udef/ Universal Data Element Framework Forum].

The Open Group members can also join the Customer Council or the Supplier Council, as appropriate. The Customer Council provides members who are primarily buyers and users of information systems a cross-forum platform to represent the customer perspective, while the Supplier Council provides members who are primarily suppliers of IT products and solutions an opportunity to work with other Supplier Members.

IT customers and suppliers come together to discuss their corporate and industry needs at The Open Groups quarterly conferences and member meetings. Both customers and suppliers benefit from the cooperation: product suppliers from accelerated market up-take of products based on open systems standards; their customers from reduced cost of integration, increased flexibility in their infrastructure and greater interoperability with their partners, customers and suppliers.

Some of The Open Group documents are only available to members, especially when they are under development.

Government Programs In addition to commercial and enterprise arena, The Open Group provides [http://www.opengroup.org/RI/ services to the government sector] - agencies, suppliers, and companies or organizations set up by governments to advance government goals.

Services to Consortia The Open Group also provides a range of services to a number of services to [http://www.opengroup.org/consortia_services/ IT consortia] and organizations, from initial organization set-up and ongoing operational support to collaboration, standards and best practices development, and assistance with technology transfer. They assist organizations with setting business objectives, strategy and procurement, and also provide certification and test development services.

= History =

The Open Group was formed from a merger of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open. In the past, the group was most known for its publication of the Single UNIX Specification paper, which (in the eyes of many OS developers) is quickly superseding the POSIX standards.

=Inventions and standards=

*The Call Level Interface (the basis for ODBC) *The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) *The Distributed Computing Environment (the basis for DCOM) available at http://opengroup.org/comsource *LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) *The Motif (widget toolkit) GUI widget toolkit (used in CDE) *OpenDoc, a now defunct specification for compound documents *The Single UNIX Specification (POSIX) *The X Window System¹

( ¹ previously maintained, developed by T.O.G. )

=See also=

*UNIX wars

= External links =

*[http://www.opengroup.org/ The Open Group] *[http://os.newsforge.com/article.plsid=04/07/28/2057223 Can GNU ever be Unix] – By Jem Matzan, 30 July 2004 (NewsForge)