IV: Determining Business and Technology Requirements
Open systems
These are systems that are built around open operating systems that are supported on multiple-vendor platforms. UNIX is the primary example of this technology. Although it may come in many flavors, such as IBM's AIX or Digital's VX, the basic operating system is supported on various hardware platforms. Several software vendors in the education arena provide applications software that is supported on various vendor platforms -- IBM, Digital, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, and so forth. In this case, the application vendors take care of any idiosyncrasies in the various flavors of the UNIX operating system.
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