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Who We Are
 The Open Group
is a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, whose vision
of Boundaryless Information Flow™ will
enable access to integrated information within and between
enterprises based on open standards and global interoperability.
The Open Group works with customers, suppliers, consortia
and other standard bodies to:
- Capture, understand and address current and emerging
requirements, and establish policies and share best practices
- Facilitate interoperability, develop consensus, and
evolve and integrate specifications and open source technologies
- Offer a comprehensive set of services to enhance the
operational efficiency of consortia
- Operate the industry’s premier certification service
The Open Group is a consortium with a foundation in its
members: a diverse group that spans all sectors of the IT
community – IT customers, systems and solutions suppliers,
tool vendors, integrators and consultants, as well as academia
and researchers.
Our members come from all over the world – 50% come
from North America, 25% from Europe, and 25% from Asia-Pacific.
We are proud to have some of the largest IT buyers and vendors
as active members, representing both government and commercial
enterprises: Capgemini, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC,
US Department of Defense, NASA, and many others.
Our buy-side members alone have combined annual IT budgets
of over US$50 Billion or 25% of the entire IT procurement
budget worldwide each year.
Why do all these organizations value membership in The
Open Group? The Open Group provides opportunity to exchange
information and shape the future of IT; members gain access
to information and ideas on a level that they otherwise could
not attain – from industry shaping events to academic
research breakthroughs. And the flexible structure of The
Open Group membership allows for almost any organization,
no matter what its size, to join and have a voice in shaping
the future.
What
We Do
The Open Group developed a range of services that provides
to its membership and also offers to third parties. These
services include strategy, management, innovation, standards,
certification and test development.
Our approach is “Making Standards Work®.
We have 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. We recognize
the importance of assured conformance through certification
and operate a number of programs, including certification
for Common Operating Environment (COE) Platform, CORBA®,
Identity Management and Directory Interoperability, IT Architects, IT Specialists,
LSB®, POSIX®, Schools Interoperability
Framework (SIF), TOGAF, UNIX®, and Wireless Application
Protocol (WAP). To learn more, go to www.opengroup.org/certification/
The key catalyst that organizations can use to make progress
towards the vision of Boundaryless Information Flow™ is
enterprise architecture. Until recently, the concept of an
enterprise IT architecture was a vision shared by very few
organizations. Today, many organizations have achieved a
degree of boundarylessness between their people, only to
find that the stovepipes are even stronger in the IT systems.
This is not surprising, given that these systems were built
with the purpose that they would only support the needs of
a single department, and did not foresee situations where
they would need to integrate information and share with the
systems of other departments or with strategic partners in
the extended enterprise.
As enterprises look to develop a flexible overall enterprise
architecture where IT principles are fully aligned with business
principles and support a company’s vision, and where
IT evolves in response to constantly changing business needs,
they need to take an urban planner approach, which enables
creation of IT ‘cities’ of the future. This approach
is based on an architectural framework and a set of standards
and regulations that all new implementations need to comply
with and which provide guidance for integration with the
legacy. In order to do that, we need experienced IT Architects.
Recognizing
the industry demand, The Open Group, which also certifies
professionals in the use of the TOGAF Architecture Development
Method (ADM) for producing open architectures, launched
the first independent, comprehensive IT Architect Certification
program. The program defines global standards for measuring
the skills and experience of IT architects and for the
operation of IT architecture practices within enterprises.
To learn more about the program, go to our IT
Architect Certification site.
Services to Commercial Market
In the commercial and enterprise arena, we focus on providing
services to our members, which span a range of organizations
from Fortune 500 companies to small boutique and academic
organizations. 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 Forums that are semi-autonomous.
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.
The Open Group Forums include:
- Architecture Forum
- Enterprise Management Forum
- Grid Enterprise Services Forum
- Identity Management Forum
- Jericho Forum
- Messaging Forum
- Platform Forum
- Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum
- Security Forum
- 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 Group’s quarterly
conferences and member meetings.
Services to Government Market
The
Open Group provides services to a broad range of government
agencies, government suppliers, and companies or organizations
set up by governments to advance government goals.
In its Forums, The Open Group provides a platform for government
agencies to discuss their requirements with potential vendors
in a neutral, non-procurement setting, and serves as a knowledgeable
broker between government and commercial needs. To address
the government agencies’ need that their systems can
interwork, we operate a range of certification programs.
As premier certification service provider that is vendor-
and technology-neutral, we provide government agencies with
confidence that the products they procure are conformant
and interoperable.
Services to Other Consortia
The Open Group provides a range
of services to a number of 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. We assist organizations
with setting business objectives, strategy and procurement,
and also provide certification and test development services.
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