The Open Group

The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral industry consortium, currently with over four hundred member organizations. It was formed in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation. Services provided include strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development.

The Open Group is most famous as the certifying body for the UNIX trademark, and its publication of the Single UNIX Specification technical standard, which extends the POSIX standards and is the official definition of a UNIX system. The Open Group also develops and manages the TOGAF standard, which is an industry standard enterprise architecture framework.

The Open Group members include a range of IT buyers and vendors as well as government agencies, for example Capgemini, Fujitsu, Oracle, Hitachi, HP, Orbus Software, IBM, Kingdee, NEC, SAP, US Department of Defense, NASA and others.

History

By the early 1990s, the major UNIX system vendors had begun to realize that the standards rivalries often termed as the Unix wars were causing all participants more harm than good, leaving the UNIX industry open to emerging competition from Microsoft. The COSE initiative in 1993 can be considered to be the first unification step and the merger of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open in 1996 as the ultimate step in the end of those skirmishes. OSF had previously merged with UNIX International in 1994, meaning that the new entity effectively represented all elements of the Unix community of the time.

In January 1997, the responsibility for the X Window System was transferred to The Open Group from the defunct X Consortium. In 1999, X.Org was formed to manage the X Window System, with management services provided by The Open Group. The X.Org members made a number of releases up to and including X11R6.8 while The Open Group provided management services. In 2004, X.Org and The Open Group worked together to establish the newly formed X.Org Foundation who then took control of the x.org domain name, and the stewardship of the X Window System. (See the history of the X Window System.)

Programs

Certification

The Open Group's best-known services are their certification programs, including certification for products and best practices: POSIX, Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF), North American State Lotteries Association (NASPL), and UNIX.

The Open Group offers certifications for IT professionals. In addition to the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) certification which covers tools, services and people certification, The Open Group also administers the Open Group Certified Architect (Open CA) program and the Open Group Certified IT Specialist (Open CITS) certification program; the latter are skills and experience based certification programs.

Member forums

The Open Group provides a platform for its members to discuss their requirements, and work jointly on development and adoption of industry standards, to facilitate enterprise integration. (Note: Some of The Open Group documents are only available to members, especially when they are under development.) Based on their area of interest, members can join one or more semi-autonomous forums, which include:

• ArchiMate Forum
• Architecture Forum
• Enterprise Management
• Identity Management Forum
• Jericho Forum
• Platform Forum
• Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum
• Security Forum
• Trusted Technology Forum
• Universal Data Element Framework Forum
• IT4IT Forum

Members come together at The Open Group’s quarterly conferences and member meetings.

Collaboration services

The Open Group also provides a range of services to consortia and organizations, from initial organization set-up and ongoing operational support to collaboration, standards and best practices development, and assistance with market impact activities. They assist organizations with setting business objectives, strategy and procurement, and also provide certification and test development services. This includes services to the government sector agencies, suppliers, and companies or organizations set up by governments to advance government goals.

Inventions and standards

• The ArchiMate Technical standard
• The Call Level Interface (the basis for ODBC)
• The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
• The Distributed Computing Environment (the basis for DCOM)
• The Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA)
• The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical standard
• The Motif GUI widget toolkit (used in CDE)
• The Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM)
• The Open Information Security Maturity Model (O-ISM3)
• The Single UNIX Specification (SUS)
• The SOA Source Book
• TOGAF (Enterprise Architecture Framework)
• The Application Response Measurement (ARM) standard
• The Common Manageability Programming Interface (CMPI) standard
• The Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) standard
• The XA Specification

See also

• Computer portal
• Computer security portal
• Software portal

External links

• Official websiteTemplate:Open Group standards