CIO — As a rule, we at CIO believe that talented people faced with cutting-edge opportunities should go for them. Occasionally, however, the cutting edge looks a little too sharp and the yellow light goes on. That’s what happened when we first took up the topic of open systems ("Getting to Unix," Nov. 15, 1993).
At that time, opening a system meant moving it from a computing environment in which all the pieces?OS, applications and hardware?came from the same vendor to one in which products from several sources were mixed. And such systems usually were organized around Unix. On paper the advantages of open systems were obvious?IT departments gained more control and more efficient use of older equipment. But those advantages had been just as obvious during the previous decade, when the market preferred single-source systems and their benefits, such as integrated support, guaranteed compatibility and responsive vendor relationships.
But by 1993 something had changed. Managers were increasingly eager to break out of the protected environments that had served them until then. We thought that was a very serious step. We warned against unrealistic deadlines and skimpy budgets, and advised thorough research of vendor finances and technical backgrounds along with the double-checking of product claims. "There is just as much to selecting an open-systems vendor as there is to configuring most mainframe systems," we warned?a frightening observation considering that mainframe configuration would certainly have been one of the labors of Hercules, had Hercules worked in IT.
In retrospect we may have worried too much. The transition to open systems turned out to be less like having heart surgery and more like going to school on the first day: traumatic, perhaps, but certainly survivable. And managers were destined to get lots of practice. During the 1990s, operating systems, application interfaces and applications themselves would all become steadily more "open," moving to greater standardization and broader access. Operating systems went from Digital Equipment’s VMS to Microsoft’s Windows NT to?increasingly?Linux. Communications protocols converged on IP. Java became inescapable. Getting to openness turned out to be not a single step but a lifelong process.
One reason for the open move had to do with scale: As markets grow larger and more complex, the incentives for simplifying access between buyers and sellers grow as well. As information networks incorporate more players and devices, interoperability issues become more critical. During the ’90s, both those trends helped make standardization issues a routine part of the IT manager’s job. (While the term open is not synonymous with standards there is considerable overlap. Open usually refers to the large fraction of standards that are either not the property of a single company or have been made freely available by their owners.)
