 I'm Steve Nunn, president and CEO of the Open Group. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, where we highlight the various components and leading experts of the Architects Toolkit, a collated portfolio of the most pertinent technology standards for enterprise architects. During the series, I'll be calling on a number of recognized experts who will bring their particular insights on how to most effectively use the various tools in the Architects Toolkit. We'll have a mix of interviews, panel sessions, and pre-recorded presentations along the way. While all standards of the Open Group are designed so they can be adopted independently of one another, the greatest value for an organization can be derived when they're used in unison, that some of the parts should be greater than the whole. In the Architects Toolkit, we have collated a portfolio of the most pertinent ones for architects together, all in one place. For most of these tools, certification from the Open Group is also available, so practitioners can demonstrate that they have the skills required, and recruiters can take the guesswork out of the recruitment process, all backed up by our Open Badges program. Super Clouds. A friend of mine asked me if I had a view on them. I said, of course. A slightly cynical one, maybe, or rather healthily skeptical, if you like, in that Super Cloud seemed to me to be a gently arrogant term for a multi-cloud, which actually itself as a term seems to have become synonymous with multiple clouds incorrectly. Like a lot of these IT silver bullets, things like clouds, containers, whatever, our industry likes to say that we've been introduced in order to reduce complexity. Until we realize, of course, that in order to sort of have these things, you need to add in a new layer to your architecture. One that you didn't know existed before, Container Organizational Layer, Super Cloud or Paz Layer, and that obviously adds the number of layers back into our architecture. However, all in all, I think Super Cloud and Multi-Cloud are great concepts, depending from an IT point of view, reduced skillset, total cost of ownership, legacy reduction. However, the pinch point remains, what's the additional business proposition? Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday. We're on a weekly cadence at the moment and it's great to have you with us. Thank you for joining us wherever you are in the world. And my thanks to Paul Hoeman, as usual. We missed you last week. I think we didn't have one, Paul, but it's great to have the EA minutes back. Always gives us something to think about and, of course, you're not cynical. Healthy skepticism is how I describe it. Anyway, great to have you with us, as I say. We have a great topic today, which I'll come to in just a moment. But just before I get there, as I say, delighted to have you with us. And I know some of you will be watching this in the comfort and convenience of a time zone of your choice at another point in time. But we love the live interaction at these events. So please do chat to each other in the chat channel. I kicked us off by saying greetings from Sonoma County, California. An unusually wet Sonoma County, California. But we love to see where you're from. So please let us know where in the world you're joining us from. When it comes to questions, however, please don't use the chat channel. Please use the Q&A channel. And if you can't see that, then click on the three little dots in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. And that will give you the option to click on Q&A. Please put any questions for our speaker today into that. And that will help me make sure I capture them. And please don't wait until the last minute to put the question in there as soon as you think of it. So that's it for the housekeeping. We're going to have a talk today on that's going to introduce many of you and refresh some of you perhaps on the Open Group Face Consortium and some of the great work that's going on there. So I'm not going to steal our speaker's thunder and go through all that, except to say that the MOSA, the Modular Open Systems Architecture Approach that Alicia will describe today is really being demanded by the U.S. government and increasingly elsewhere I believe. So even if Federal Avionics which is where this all started is not your thing do pay attention because one of the great values of architecture is to use it to solve complex problems in complex environments and Avionics is one of those. So some of the lessons learned here can be equally applicable to many other industries. So without further ado it's a great pleasure to welcome my colleague in our days Alicia Taylor who is the Open Group Face Consortium Program Director Prior to joining us at the Open Group Alicia was active in the Face Consortium actually she spent six and a half years as a contractor to Accient Inc supporting the U.S. Army PEO Aviation and as the PEO Aviation Project and Planning Analyst Alicia was responsible for special projects managing budgets, tracking tasks providing expertise to the Face and SOSA consortia working with universities and coordinating the Army, Face and SOSA TIMS. During her last nine months there she supported the Digital Engineering and Model Based Systems Engineering Program and contributed to policy procedure and SharePoint site update. So Alicia has lived and breathed the Face Consortium activities and continues to do so and she's going to share what that's all about to the extent that we allow in 20 minutes and over to you Alicia, warm welcome from Talk It Tuesday. Good morning, good afternoon good day from Huntsville, Alabama in the United States, so welcome What I want to do today is talk about the Face Consortium which is an Open Group Consortium with over 90 government industry and academia organizations and over 1,400 individual members It's Government Industry and Academia Collaboration encouraging innovation and refining business processes developing vendor neutral open standards which enable software portability, reusability and inoperability. It started in 2010 as an approach designed as a response to U.S. Government aviation community complex problems basically the primary focus has been aviation however we do know that it's been applied to ground vehicles weapon systems, training and simulation commercial aircraft and others. We are a mature software standard with a comprehensive ecosystem as I mentioned business processes technical practices we are a software standard and we actually have two standards we have the face technical standard which is more well known and then the UDDL which is commercial data description language standard. So the face initiative I mentioned started with a problem from the DOD the U.S. DOD and typically what happens when aircraft are built they are unique. They have a platform unique requirements by a single vendor where capabilities are tightly coupled with avionics sensors and operating system and the face initiative changed that and as you can see this traditional or legacy model it's unique. There's long integration cycles it limits software reuse and increases integration cost so what happened is the face technical standard created an open layered architecture that allows any face software component to move from one aircraft platform to the next with minimal integration complexity on any desired hardware platform. The face technical standard is a standard of standards it was based on over 60 proven commercial and military avionics standards such as air ink 653 6661 OpenGL, POSIX, and more. Done right the resulting applications need minimal change to work in different platforms and we've tested this out through the years with something called BITS event which is an internal integration activity or a larger technical interchange so basically we have recreated a layered approach a layered architecture and that architecture is a reference architecture and what the face technical standard does is it provides a software approach as I mentioned designed to address barriers of modularity portability and inoperability it extracts or abstracts software capabilities into five logical segments it has a reference and a data architecture it uses interface definition language or IDL definitions for the face interfaces and then the programming language mappings from the IDL to the following languages so face supports C, C++, Ada, Java the technical standard is our key stone document and as I mentioned it describes both the reference architecture and the data architecture when we started in 2010 the face approach, the face initiative was very unique because we require a data architecture and what that does is that promotes integration the face technical standard along with all of our documents are open non-proprietary they're publicly available without licensing term, royalty, anything like that and all this is going to be on our website and I'll give you the link to that a little bit later so the face reference architecture it has five segments you can see these are color coded you'll see these colors appear anytime you see a presentation or something at a conference or workshop these are standard colors where you start out with a portable component segment platform services segment iOS services segment and operating segment as we move from the PCS to the TSS you can see interfaces on both sides those provide data specifics or they move data messages between the PCS and the PSS which is here the iOS services again data movement external accesses to your devices and your external hardware and then you've got the OS segment and you've got an interface here now the interfaces are very important because that's where you have these critical interfaces these segments are defined by the critical interfaces and so this whole structure the face conformance architecture together give us the foundation of the face technical standard I mentioned earlier that the face consortium has a comprehensive and mature ecosystem it defines key interfaces it delivers a face technical standard and it's developed and implemented a conformance verification certification program which I'll talk about a little bit more it enabled tool development this is toolkit Tuesday certainly we need to talk about tools it's delivered the face data model data architecture we've developed business models that attract to government and industry I mentioned that we've conducted annual integration events we have a established repository a certified face conformance software applications we've defined acquisition guidance and contracting language and we just recently implemented a course accreditation program so going back the face technical standard how do you know something has been developed using the face technical standard well we have a conformance program that ensures that the defined interfaces adhere to the face reference architects we have tool development we have a number of tool development companies that are part of the face consortium these tools are used to generate code data models they support the face conformance program they bridge a gap between languages and they do more some of the tools that are also available through the face consortium are the conformance test suite that's one of our primary tools which is used to test code against the requirements of the face technical standard we also have a hello world calling balsa currently right now balsa is only available to face consortium members but we're working on getting that publicly released as far as the tool development the third party tools within the consortium some of those unfortunately are not free but we do have a website or we do have a link on the face consortium website that provides additional information about some of those tools so you can see our comprehensive ecosystem I mentioned the face registry the face registry is simply a listing of face certified conformant products we refer to those as units of conformance and the idea here is a unit as far as the face consortium or face technical standards concern we look at components and not systems so we do not certify systems this gives the whole idea of modular being able to move one component to one aircraft back to the other or ground vehicle or fill in the blank whatever your need is we the registry is again on our website you'll see the fourth bullet down there has the link you can log in there's a free log in you do need to register but you can log in and access all of this information the registry enables software developers systems integrators or anyone who wants to acquire software to find certified face UOC's these are just some of our products in the registry we currently have 39 conformant face products our registry has a three step process goes through verification and certification often times a product will go through a verification an organization or company will choose to take a product through verification but they choose not to go through the certification process or listed on the registry that really has to do with security reasons a lot of companies are DoD and they may just choose not to list their products out in the public but I do want to emphasize this registry contains metadata it does not contain any source code or any intellectual properties so you heard Steve at the very beginning talk about MOSA MOSA is modular open systems approach it actually started back in 2005 and we've had a lot of movement particularly in the last three to five years and face the face approach addresses all five principles of MOSA and is one of either it used to be the only I think it's one of very few open standards that actually meet all of the five principles you'll see we've established an enabling environment we've got technical standard data architecture we've got tools rig reference implementation guide if you want to have a little bit more information about the technical standard we have a three volume implementation guide we've got examples for training we've got contracting language we've got a registry employees modular design we have the face reference architecture data architecture we've designated key interfaces I talked about those use open standards I mentioned that we are a standard of standard having used over 60 existing and widely used standards to develop the face technical standard and we have a we can certify conformance anybody can say their product is made to a particular standard or develop to using a particular standard but we actually have a process that verifies that the product does meet the requirements outlined in the particular technical standard so there's also a lot of misconceptions out there first off face adoption is only for DoD aircraft as I mentioned earlier that's where we started in 2010 helping Army Navy and Air Force aviation solve a complex problem but we also know that it has been applied to ground vehicles ships weapon systems training and simulation and commercial aircraft good software is good software everything that we do requires software as a matter of fact as far as cost of software you can see that increasing significantly that's very important while we reuse things the face technical standard is subject to export regulations that is not true as a matter of fact we just opened up membership to four additional countries Australia Canada New Zealand and United Kingdom before we opened up membership we did an extensive review we talked to the State Department and we know that there is nothing in our standard that is going to be subject to those export regulations software cannot be face conformant and meet do d178 see requirements again that's false we just released a guide that talks about face conformance and airworthiness face consortium documents are proprietary I mentioned earlier that everything that the face consortium develops is on the website and it's free for you guys to use I mentioned that we opened up membership to Australia Canada New Zealand and the United Kingdom if you're on the call and your organization is operating in one of those countries please talk to us we'd certainly like to get you more information and get you involved adopting the face technical standard is complex and cost prohibitive we have shown over and over again that this is not accurate as a matter of fact I would say that not adopting the face technical standard is cost prohibitive it improves integration reduces integration cost so if you happen to be from UK in one of the areas I want to personally invite you the open group summit is scheduled for the week of April 17th through the 20th there is a program or a session on EA for sustainability and introduction to the face consortium it's on Tuesday April the 18th from 11 at 1230 there's a link here it's also on the open group site and we would like to invite you it's free of charge to come learn more to ask questions and let's have a conversation maybe you're not from the US maybe you don't use Mosa but you're from United Kingdom and your focus is on COSA or pyramid we want to talk more about that so in conclusion the open group face consortium collaborates on developing open software standards to innovate processes and practices and accelerate face adoption for more information you can go to the website at opengroup.org forward slash face and my email address is user at opengroup.org so I are there questions thank you Alicia very hard to cover a topic that's being worked on since 2010 in 20 minutes or less so great job thank you very much for doing that we do have some questions for you before I get to those one of the things that I think is particularly notable about the work that's gone on in the face consortium is the fact that the clearly there's a lot of important work being done on the technical standard and that's really where the rubber hits the road but what really happened to my mind that made a huge difference to the take up of the standard and it is the focus from day one as well on the business side of things the rationale for using the standard what the business problem was can you talk a little bit more about that and why that's important yes thank you Steve anybody can create a standard but really for the standard to be beneficial it has to be widely accepted adopted and used and it's those business practices those business policies that help that happen it's not just about the technical standard it's about how to use that technical standard it's about how it works with other standards and all that kind of falls under the business working group or the business component it's the business processes that promote the actual technical practices right right absolutely and you know and it makes a real difference because the you know standards get produced or things get put all the time and the you know if you're a program officer or procurement officer you see it and think oh another rock to fetch or something else I've got to worry about we've got guidance and things that actually make it useful and helpful and it really does make a big difference and we've replicated that for those of you who know a little bit about the open group who've attended any of our events or previous talk at Tuesdays we've heard us talk about some of the work in our open process automation forum for example and our SOSA consortium and our OSDU forum all of which kind of learnt lessons from what's been going on in the phase consortium and the approach taken with this business first approach which is really important so questions that we've had Alicia what would you actually you've answered one of them at least once which is do you have to join the phase consortium to have access to the technical standard and other documents and I think just to save time I think you said other than BULSA right now which is a member only thing everything we publish is available worldwide for anyone to use okay great what do you see as the phase consortium priorities for the next few years well one of the things we're trying to do is streamline processes we do know that going through the conformance process can can be challenging sometimes but we've had a focus we we surveyed our members and we know what the members say so we're focusing on streamlining processes and we're also focusing on model based systems engineering those are the two things that jump out at me quickly okay thank you and probably last question in the interests of time you talked about products being developed in accordance with the phase the phase technical standard and the MOSA approach the question is has the phase consortium seen an increase in the number of products being developed using the phase requirements yes we have and as the three branches of service well actually four have those MOSA requirements that you're talking about we're seeing a lot of products being developed we're seeing products being put on aircraft but we're also seeing the number of products in our library right now we have 39 products again there's more out there to have been through the process that are just not in the registry but out of those 39 products I would say that we've almost increased 50% probably in the last probably four to five months everyone particularly people in the U.S. and outside the U.S. as we work with our allies are starting to focus on MOSA and we know that the phase approach the phase initiative makes MOSA possible and fortunately our folks that created a long time ago were we're forward thinking enough to realize that it's great and so great a great line to end on Alicia Taylor thank you very much for joining us on the Toolkit Tuesday today thank you well done so as I say thanks to Alicia and thanks to Paul Holman for his video I think Paul actually joined us live today if I'm not mistaken so if you're if you're out there Paul then thanks for joining and next week as I said at the beginning we're on a weekly cadence right now so next week we switch gears to an area that's being covered by the open group open footprint forum and that's basically working on standards for capturing and reporting on energy emissions so joining us next week we'll have we'll have Sammy Lachmanan who is the co-chair of the open group open footprint forum that's not his day job obviously but that's where he interacts with us most obviously and most most consistently and he's going to be talking to us about empowering climate transitions for a carbon data model and this really is a forum and an activity that I expect we will all hear much more about because it's so topical and we at the open group are really in a position to be working in a niche area nobody is really working on a consistent way to capture and report on these energy emission standards starting with greenhouse gases and carbon emissions but moving into other areas too so please join us next week it's a topic that impacts every industry and Sammy will have some great stuff as usual to share with us and finally Alicia mentioned it but a shameless plug for the open group summit for those of you who are able to make it to London in person the open group summit will be at the QE2 centre in Westminster from April 17 to the 20th we'd love to see you there there's lots of different topics being covered many of our forums and work groups are getting together and public sessions and presentations on various various days so please look at our website opengroup.org for more information meanwhile thank you for joining us today on Toolkit Tuesday thank you again to Alicia keep safe and well wherever you are in the world I'm Steve Nunn thank you for watching Toolkit Tuesday