 Hi, I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I'll be your moderator for today's panel examining UNIX, A Journey of Innovation. We're here with a distinguished panel to look at the 20-year history of UNIX and its standardization. So allow me please to introduce our panel. We're here with Andrew Josie. He's the Director of Standards at the Open Group. We're also here with Darren Johnson, Director of Solaris Engineering at Oracle. Tom Matthews, Distinguished Engineer of Power Systems at IBM. And Jeff Kyle, Director of Mission Critical Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It's not often that you get a 20-year anniversary in tech where the relevance is still so high and the prominence of the technology is still so wide. So let me first address a question to Andrew Josie at the Open Group. How has that been able to maintain its relevance in such a dynamic world? Thank you Dana. We saw efforts such as the IEEE POSIX, then XOPEN, and later the Open Group was formed to bring that all together when the different vendors realized the benefits of bringing the innovation to become a common platform. All our companies provide cloud services, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, and whether it's infrastructure as a service, software as a service, or any of the other as a service options. And the interesting thing is that to really be able to provide that consistency, that capability to our customers, we rely on a foundation, and that foundation is Unix. How is it that the common spec has been so instrumental in making this a powerful underpinning for so much modern technology? I think a solid foundation is built upon standards because we can have, like you mentioned, assurance. If you look at the certification process, there's more than 45,000 test cases that gives assurance to developers, to customers, that there's going to be determinism. And of anything, I mean all the IT people that I've talked to, deterministic behavior is so critical because when it's not deterministic, things go wrong. Yeah, so if you look at the standard, it actually contains several components. And it's really modular in a way that depending on your need, you can pick a piece of it and support that. Maybe you don't need the complete operating system for a highly scalable environment. Maybe you just need like a microcontroller. Well, you can pick the standard, so there's consistency at that level. And then that feeds into, let's say, the development environment in which an engineer may be developing something on. And then that scales to, let's say, you need a lot of those services on a large data center. Well, you've still got that consisting throughout. And whether it's Solaris, AIX, HPX, or even FreeBSD or Linux, there's a consistency because of those elements of the standard. Well, I think, as was said, for developers, it's the consistency that really matters. Unix standards develop and deliver consistency. This allows the developers to focus a lot more on interesting challenges and customer value at the application and user level. And in today's virtualized, cloud-ready world, that's critical. In the end, customers are still trying to do the same things that they always had. They're trying to use applications and technology to get data from one place to another and more effectively, efficiently use that data to make business decisions. That's happening more and more mobily, right? I think every HPX, AIX, Solaris Unix system out there is fully connected to a mobile world and the Internet of Things. We're actually securing it more than many customers realize. In addition to just running the business, things have to stay up. And it's been that way for a long time, 7x24x365. So these three elements, reliability and availability and scalability, they've been a big focus. And a lot of that has been delivered through the hardware environment, in addition to the standards. I think in the standards test suite right now, stable reliability, availability, serviceability and this investment protection element. But what any standard, whether it's Ethernet standard or Unix, it helps bring things together in a way that you don't have to think about how to get data from one point to another. And mobility really is about moving data from one place to another in a quick fashion where you can do transactions in microseconds or milliseconds or seconds. And you want some assurance that the data that you send from one place to another. But it's also about making sure, and this is a topic that's really important today, is security. And actually it was basically the open group's members. Son and IBM and HP came to the open group at the time and said, look, we've got to go and talk to IEEE and we've got to talk to IISO about bringing all the experts together in a single place to do the standard. So starting in 1998 we met in Austin at the IBM facility, hence the name, the Austin Group. And we started on that road. So now today, since then, we've developed a single set of books. And on the front cover we stamp the designation of it being an IEEE standard, an open group standard and an international standard. So the technical folks, they only have to go to a single place to do the work once. And then we put it through the adoption processes of the individual organizations. Common APIs, that's one thing we've always wanted to do, is to look at raising that bar of common functionality. So, you know, Linux and open source systems, you know, they very much are working with the standard as much as anybody else. And I think there's a couple of key points. One is it's great that we have an organization open group that not only helps create the standard or manage the standard, but is also developing the test suites for certification. So it's one organization working with the community, Austin Group, and of course IEEE and the open group members, to create a test suite that allows us to, again, we've mentioned 45,000 tests, right? If any one of our organizations had to create or manage that separately, that's a huge expense. They do that for that. That's part of the service. And they've evolved that, and it's grown. I don't know what it originally was, but, I mean, 45,000 tests has grown and they've made it more efficient in terms of the process. And it's a collaborative process. If we have issues, well, is it our issue? Is it the test suite issue? And there's great responsiveness. So, I mean, kudos to the open group because they kind of make it easy for us to certify. So I think another element that's important on this cost point is just, you know, back to the standards, the cost of doing development, the cost of doing that. I mean, imagine a world, particularly being an ISV, a software ISV, imagine a world where there were no standards. And that world existed at one point in time. Now with the standards, of course, you know, ISV, you know, you've got to write it for one platform, it's portable over to the other platform. So that's been crucial, right? I mean, is that the standards have actually encouraged innovation in the software industry because it made it easier for developers to develop. Yes, Dana, in our standards process, we're very much able to take on almost any problem, but this would certainly be a very exciting problem for us to look to tackle, to bring parties together. But that's one thing we were able to do is to bring different parties together, looking for that commonality to try and build the consensus. That's the one thing we do, we get people in the room, people talk through the different points of view. What the open group is able to do is to almost provide a safe harbor where the different vendors can come in and not be seen as talking in a anti-competitive position, but actually, frankly, discussing the differences in their implementations and deciding what's the best common way to go forward with setting a standard. I think that true innovation can be best done on a foundation. In OpenStack, it's a number of communities that are loosely affiliated, delivering great progress, but there's interoperability, there's issues that, and it's not with intent, it's just people are moving fast. If some foundation elements can be built, that's great for them because then us as vendors can more easily support the solutions that these communities are bringing to us, and then we can deliver to our customers. Now I know that each of our companies will go to great lengths to make sure that our customers don't see that inconsistency. So we bear the burden for that, but what if we could spend more time helping the communities be more successful rather than, as I mentioned before, reinventing the wheel? But I think Unix can present that secure, reliable foundation to a hybrid cloud environment for customers. I mean, we've got IBM, HP, Oracle, sitting here, and I'll say virtually, Linux, other communities that are participating coming to a mutual agreement saying this is what we believe is best. And you know what, it's open to disagreement. You can have an open dialogue in which anybody's invited, in the case of the Austin Group, it's everybody, actually in the case of any of the efforts around Unix, it's an open process, it's open involvement, and in the case of the Open Group, again another Open, it's vendor-neutral. So their goal is to find a vendor-neutral solution. And I think that the foundation of Unix, even going back to the original development, but certainly since standards came about, is that one word, open. Well, great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. Thank our panelists today for joining this discussion about the enabling innovation through Unix on its 20th anniversary. Congratulations to the Open Group and to the Unix community for that. And also look for more information on Unix at the various sites on the Open Group. They have many landing pages for work that's progressing still. And thank you all for your attention and input. Thanks, Dana.