OURS and Open Group strengthen ties - Open User Recommended Solutions - Industry Trend or Event

Software Magazine, May, 1997 by Patrick Porter

What do CIOs of Fortune 500 companies and senior executives from the world's largest software vendors talk about when they get together for a weekend? In a word: relationships.

The most nettlesome issues facing big customers and big suppliers today have a lot more to do with the nature of their relationships with one another than with pure technology -- feeds and speeds and the like.

More important to CIOs is the assurance that vendors will listen to their customers when it comes to writing their software licensing contracts or establishing interoperability specifications. And vendors? They want to be treated like strategic partners instead of commodity suppliers who must compete solely on price.

Sounds sensible. So why is nobody doing it? In fact, a number of groups have been working to promote better communication and win/win negotiating between customers and vendors. One of these, a collection of about 50 large vendors and Fortune 500 customers, is known by a somewhat unwieldy moniker: Open User Recommended Solutions (OURS). The group meets twice yearly to discuss the work of its task forces, which focus on everything from software licensing and distribution to network management, mobile computing and information security.

The central theme in these task force meetings, which continue throughout the year, is how to develop practical guidelines to improve the business model for both customers and vendors. In an actual task force meeting, or "workshop," an equal number of customers and vendors sit down at a table for hours on end and politely bang heads over some of the most difficult issues confronting the industry. Through it all they maintain surprisingly good humor, and the bi-annual meetings have even developed a strong "homecoming" flavor.

From time to time, a task force will issue a white paper, or "recommended solution," which becomes a baseline business practice that can be adopted by customers and vendors alike. For example, when the software licensing task force issued its first white paper a few years back, OURS member IBM not only adopted its recommendations, the company rewrote its software licensing contracts to reflect the change in its business practices.

While OURS has been able to influence the business practices of some of the most notable companies in the industry, including members such as IBM, Motorola, Oracle and Computer Associates -- not to mention customer-side members such as Chase Manhattan Bank, Pacific Gas & Electric, Bellcore, Levi Strauss and Merrill Lynch -- for most of its six year existence, the organization has pretty much labored in obscurity. That was fine with most members, who worried that the workshops would be unable to function effectively and build consensus on controversial issues if the organization became too large. Now that OURS has begun to publish a veritable blizzard of white papers, however, members want to see their work distributed -- and adopted -- industry-wide.

Last September in Dallas, OURS ini-tialed an agreement with the Open Group, Cambridge, Mass., which called for the latter to buy OURS white papers and distribute them to senior executives at the Open Group's 300 member companies. That arrangement put the white papers into the hands of more than 700 executives -- about 60% of them customers -- affiliated with the Open Group.

The relationship between OURS and the Open Group has worked so well that the two organizations have decided to tie the knot a bit more tightly. At its most recent gathering in New Orleans in March, OURS Executive Director Jeffrey Kristjansen announced the formation of a much closer alliance between the two groups. In return for the non-exclusive right to publish and sell its white papers, the Open Group will provide OURS with much needed marketing and administrative support and new headquarters located in the Open Group's Cambridge office. According to Kristjansen, the alliance will free him from his role of bi-annual meeting planner and workshop facilitator, allowing him to focus on increasing OURS membership, promoting its white papers, and furthering its message of improving customer/vendor relationships.

"It's not a merger," says Kristjansen, although he admits the two organizations considered the idea "for about 10 minutes." "We felt that a merger did not make sense," says Frank Carnella, senior vice president of developing and distributed technology services at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City.

"It's not in our plan. This is not the other shoe dropping." Carnella, who serves as vice chairman of OURS, says the organization will keep its current board of directors and maintain its focus on practical, near-term, tactical issues surrounding relationships. Meanwhile, the Open Group will maintain its focus on longer-term, strategic technology and standards issues.

Despite the great synergy between the two organizations, the alliance will not result in a joint membership. Companies that want to participate in both groups will have to pay twice. Nevertheless, the partnership is close enough that OURS and the Open Group will co-locate their next membership meetings in Boston this fall. Members of both organizations will be invited to participate in some joint sessions.