Topicality:

"Integrated Information Infrastructures" (In3)  was the plenary theme for The Open Group Conference held at the Hilton, Anaheim Monday January 21 through Friday January 25, 2002.   Access to integrated information through Integrated Information Infrastructures is the stated need of CIOs who are under pressure to justify what they are doing, to do a better job of providing information in ways that support the changing needs of business, and to keep within tighter budgets.

The Conference also included a number of open sessions covering Identity Management, Architecture, Real-time and Embedded Systems, Quality of Service, Enterprise Management, Managing the Mobile Workforce, as well as an Open Forum and a plenary feedback session reporting on the work achieved through the week.  There were also closed meetings of The Open Group member forums.

Some highlights from the Conference

• In3 seen as a real problem – work has started
  
  Integrated Information Infrastructure (In3) is seen as an important challenge.  Feedback from attendees shows that not having an “Integrated Information Infrastructure” where systems interoperate, i.e., easily exchange information and use that information to improve operations, is causing organizations real pain resulting in 100s of millions of dollars in lost opportunities, billions of dollars are said to be spent to make systems interoperate or to recover from mistakes, and the risks are not only financial but deal with lost lives.

  The Open Group membership is looking forward to announcing  the availability of  profiles that represent collections of standards that can be used to produce products that are certified to interoperate as specified.  These profiles represent major building blocks necessary to provide an Integrated Information Infrastructure which is estimated to save companies billions per year.

  A Bird of a Feather Session run by The Open Group Customer Council commenced work on the problem.  This builds upon the Business Scenario described in a White Paper entitled "The Interoperable Enterprise".

   

• Need to assess standards and to look for compliance and enforcement
  
  There was a strong case for a careful assessment of standards to ensure their fitness for purpose.  Feedback from attendees confirmed the need for compliance and enforcement through testing and certification programs.  There was a need for the right standards, for profiles of standards - it was no longer sufficient for vendor's just to claim conformance, In3 demanded more.

• Active Loss Prevention Initiative validated
  
  Our speakers confirmed the need to look beyond IT solutions;  they gave strong support to The Open Group's new Active Loss Prevention Initiative.

• EMA Challenge gets a result
  
  The report and demonstration of the EMA Security Challenge supported by the Boeing Company showed the vendor's have risen to the challenge of sending and receiving highly encrypted email across the Internet fit for the purpose of exchanging highly confidential emails as stated in the Challenge.  Next steps includes publication of the results, a toolkit to help vendors implement, and the development of a certification program.

• Identity Management - solid business justification
  
  The full day open session on Identity Management involved four of The Open Group Forums (Directory Interoperability, Security, EMA and Mobile Management).   Our keynote presentation by Jamie Lewis, Burton Group, set the scene with the subject being dissected by a number of speakers.  There is a solid business justification for work in this area and discussion gave rise to a number of actions including the completion of a business scenario and a set of requirements statements.

• John Zachman insists Enterprise Architecture a must have
  
  John Zachman gave a keynote presentation and contributed a successful Architecture Briefing.  He argued strongly that Enterprise Architecture is absolutely essential to development of robust enterprise and IT infrastructures that can evolve to meet the needs business in today's rapidly changing and evolving environment.

Meeting Reports

For the forth time at The Open Group Conference, we were able to Webcast many of the sessions across the Internet.  This enabled a significant number of people who could not travel to Anaheim to benefit from the Conference and Member Meeting.

Access to the recorded webcasts is available to members.

A report of the Plenary Feedback is available here.  Summaries, slides, and other materials are available in the full Post Meeting Documentation which is only available to Members, and to non-members who attended the Conference.

Our Speakers:

We must also thank the presenters at our Customer Council, Identity Management and the other sessions.  External contributors to these sessions through the week are too numerous to mention here (please see the individual reports). We extend thanks to all our speakers who gave such a breadth of information and insights in our Plenary and other Sessions.

Supporters:

We thank Burton Group who supported the Conference especially our Identity Management sessions.  We also thank Boeing Company for sponsoring the Tuesday evening - EMA Security Challenge reception - presentation and live demonstrations.

Participation:

Forums & Work Groups:

Architecture Forum:

The Architecture Forum hosted an Architecture Briefing, which had an excellent keynote from John Zachman, supplemented by contributions from Fred Waskiewicz on OMG’s Model Driven Architecture, and Chris Greenslade on the TOGAF Tools Challenge. In their Workshop, Forum members progressed a number of projects in the 2002 work program, including developing the notion of an Open Group Certified Architect, and moving TOGAF from the Technical Architecture space and into the Enterprise Architecture space.  The Forum is also looking at the ALP initiative and seeing how architecture can contribute.

Directory Interoperability Forum:

The DIF held a seminar on "Enterprise Directories - Preparing For The Next Generation" and participated with other forums in the open meeting on Identity Management. In addition, the DIF held a members-only meeting in which it reviewed its work program and planned future events, which will include a Plugfest in February, an LDAP Developers' Conference in April, and a new version of the LDAP brand.

EMA Forum - The EMA Challenge:

The EMA PKI Challenge was the focus of activity (reported elsewhere).

Enterprise Management Forum:

The Enterprise Management Forum had a joint meeting with the  Quality of Service Task Force at which the two groups pursued their common direction in areas related to service management. Most of the remainder of the meeting was given over to further progression of the Pegasus open source project. A detailed project plan was developed to cover the remaining work needed to complete the development of Release 2.0, which will be appearing in commercial products from major platform vendors later in the year.

Mobile Management Forum:

The forum members took part in the Indentity Management Session on Wednesday.  On Thursday members there were two presentations from end users concerning the market place.  Richard Paine from Boeing presented PeerNet2 (connectivity within Boeing for advanced mobility) and also he talked about a number of projects within Boeing concerned with seamless mobility, voice over IP, etc.  Second, there was a presentation concerning a joint venture project of Lufthansa and Seimens Business Services Group concerned with building airport IT systems.  Following these presentations, several vendors presented solutions that they have brought to the market place.  Roger Mizumori presented on the touch stone paper that the MMF has been working on.  There were also presentations about the MMF's Utility and Transport Logistics Workshops.

Quality of Service Task Force:

The two-day Quality of Service Task Force session, focused on exploring customers' QoS requirements; requirements driven from the Enterprise, but which lack the corresponding mappings to QoS delivery and policy mechanisms currently applied to the Network and Service Provider Domains. The QoS Task Force's mission is to facilitate those mappings by working with other industry consortia, and Task Force members to insure the requirements map to existing and future standards work in all QoS domains, providing true end-to-end controls and guarantees.    Presentations focused on this mission by offering information and discussion on: Various views of QoS and Resource Management Policy, Real-Time and Performance Measurements for Mission Critical Applications in the Enterprise and the Network domains, and on The Open Group's QoS, industry-wide, Standard Information Base, which will serve a basis for evaluating, which existing standards truly support our customer's operational requirements.

Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum:

The Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum continues to gather momentum. Attendance at this meeting was 108, making this one of the largest, and certainly the fastest growing group within The Open Group. Sessions held at Anaheim included the second annual Real-time Linux interest group covering issues surrounding Real-time Linux. Of major interest was the presentation on the "Next Generation POSIX Threading - Moving Linux to The Enterprise". Representatives from OMG, SAE, DoD RTAG, IEEE POSIX SSWG-RT and INCITS R-1 gave status reports. The sessions on Safety Critical, Hard Real-time Java, Security for Limited Resource Environments, POSIX Real-time Profiles and Real-time Access to Data where an overwhelming success. The Real-time and Embedded Forum concluded with a Buff on "Open Systems and Military Applications.

Security Forum:

The Security Forum was pleased with the success and synergy of the EMA Challenge results, the Identity Management session, and publication of its Managers Guide to Information Security (MGIS). It is nearing completion of draft 1 of its Guide to Security Patterns and its Guide to Data Privacy, and is also pursuing new work on PKI manageability, on a High-Level API to Security Services, and on Real-time Security use-cases and protection profiles.

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