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18 September, 1997

ANSA Consortium Confidential

MINUTES OF THE ANSA MANAGEMENT COMMITTEE &

TECHNICAL COMMITTEE JOINT MEETING

held on

10th June1997 at APM, Cambridge

Present: Bill, O'Riordan (Chairman), Carolyn Story (VP Research & Consultancy), William Gibson (Programme Director), Yvonne Peat (Secretary), Bob Briscoe (BT), Bruno Dumant (CNET), Leslie Clark (GECM ESAMS), David Hearn (DERA), Dr Matsuo (Fujitsu), Ian Davies (GPT), Dave McVitie (ICL), Bent Thomsen (ICL), Lone Leth Thomsen (ICL),

Apologies Martin French (TC Chairman), Andrew Herbert (Chief Architect), Amjad Farooq (DERA), Andrew Farncombe (GEC-Marconi), Neil Mason (GPT)

Welcome and review of Agenda

1 MINUTES AND ACTIONS

The minutes of the last joint MC/TC meeting were approved and signed. There were no matters arising and all actions had been completed.

Copies of all the following presentations were circulated.

2 QUALITY OF SERVICE OVERVIEW (APM:1977.01.00) -

Oyvind Hansssen, Tromso University

Oyvind has produced a report investigating the main concepts and issues in the suppport of Quality of Service, focusing on open distributed computing and middleware platforms.

3 DIMMA: BUILDING A REAL-TIME ORB - Ian Macmillan

Ian gave a progress report on the DIMMA project including the release of DIMMA 2.0 and explained its new functionality.

4 THE DIMMA QOS ENABLED IIOP MODEL - Simon Waterhouse

Simon explained the protocol IIOP structure and its implementation in DIMMA

5 THE DIMMA QOS ENABLE FLOW PROTOCOL - Douglas Donaldson

Douglas's presentation stimulated lively discussion concerning allocation and over-allocation.

The project has produced a good base for building other protocols. This is a generic model and the team would be happy to discuss other possible protocols with individual sponsors.

The Programme Manager requested Committee approval, there had been a large amount of reworking of the code, producing real gains in multimedia and Quality of Service aspects. Bob Briscoe commented that BT were much happier with the latest work.

Work Approved.

APM are looking for channels to market this work.

6 SWITCHLETS AND DYNAMIC VIRTUAL ATM NETWORKS

Kobus van der Merwe, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

Kobus gave a lively talk which stimulated discussion.

7 FLEXINET UPDATE AND PROGRESS - Richard Hayton

Flexinet Phase 1 is complete; the two main deliverables are a QoS report (funded by NATO, and produced by Oyvind Hanson as part of his PhD work), and the Flexinet Network Demonstrator (see below).

The plans for Phase 2 were presented;. Due to the reduced ANSA membership fee, (discussed later in Carolyn Story's presentation) the project is currently under-resourced and so priorities need to be decided.

The framework is technology independent, but the plan is to build an application in JAVA.

The team are currently putting together a joint work proposal with IC Parc.

8 THE NETWORK DEMONSTRATOR - Zhixue Wu and Feng Huang

The motivation for this work had been to test and demonstrate some key ideas to input to the FLexiNet project. Zhixue explained the work and then he and Feng ran through the demonstration.

9 FOLLOWME ESPRIT UPDATE - Billy Gibson

The Commission have given a positive response to the proposal, but with the following amendments. A likely budget of 2.8M ECU to be split between the consortium partners, duration of 15-18 months, demonstration within 6 months of start, proposed start in September. The FollowMe Consortium will be meeting on Friday to define and agree the project plan, resources and priorities. The feedback from the workshop was a preference for much more modular work packages. A lot of work has gone into setting up the project with the Commission, with APM (acting as lead partner) bearing the brunt of this. Billy assured the members that he will ensure the Consortium contract allows the sponsors access to the project results

10 THE FOLLOWME ODP MODEL - David Franklin

David presentedthe results to date of the initial modelling work that is driving the content of the project; currently it is based on the consortium scenarios.

Carolyn Story requested feedback from the sponsors as to which parts of the project they were interested in. She also requested scenarios so that the work can be biased towards the sponsors. This involvement and input from the ANSA partners will ensure that the areas important to ANSA are a priority.

Bob Briscoe commented that BT are more interested in setting standards rather than individual applications. Bruno Dumont of CNET stated they were more interested in the Architecture than end user applications, and that they would like to work more closely with us on the architectural issues.

David Hearn of DERA thought they might have a project which could be relevant. Companies pay large sums of money to press clipping services, also at the start of a project have to trawl through vast amounts of information to find items relevant to project. He suggested these might be good areas for FlexiNet to explore.

An action was placed on all members to come up with a scenario by end of the month. to ensure the sponsors views are represented in the project.

ACTION: ALL

11 MOBILE AGENT COMPARISON (APM:1989) - Mike Bursell

A comparison had been completed on four possible agent environments. ICL and Fujitsu commented that the choice of agent would have a large impact on them. Input to Billy Gibson from the sponsors on any preference they might have was requested before the Consortium meeting on Friday June 13th.

ACTION: ALL

Dr Matsuo commented that he thought CHOAS would be released to the public.

12 ANSA STATUS AND FUTURE- Carolyn Story

The consensus of the meeting was that ANSA was a success and that it has been internationally recognised; ANSA is the longest running consortium of its type, and has set the agenda for distributed systems wolrd wide as well as contributing significantly to standards.

Now that DIMMA is finished, the focus has moved on from basic Distribution to mobile software components. The two new projects, Flexinet and Puppies, represent the 2 new paradigms which will form the basis for all future computing.

Carolyn summarised the 1997 financial situation which shows a £40k loss between January and April; this was due to the DIMMA completion activities, and significant additional work required to secure the 3M ECU FollowMe project.

The new contract model of 1-1 contracts with APM based on a new ANSA core contract was discussed.

The sponsors had a number of questions concerning the new core contract which will replace the original base contracts which apply to APM, BT, CNET, GEC-Marconi, GPT and ICL (currently DERA and Fujitsu have separate contracts directly with APM):

The proposal for consideration was that each partner could exploit internally, and would pay a once off licencee for full exploitation of results from each project (currently, this means separate payments for full exploitation of Puppies and Flexinet results. The money from any sales of licenses would be ploughed back into the ANSA research programme. The existing sponsors (including APM) will pay £45k per license, new sponsors a negotiable figure above £45k and non sponsors well above this figure. Once agreed at the meeting, this would be added into the new core contract.

Bob Briscoe commented that BT were particularly concerned about fees for 3rd Party use, as they are involved with many universities etc. He also expressed concern that there was one rule for sponsors as they had to ask permission to pass IPR to third parties but that as APM would own the IPR and it would not be tied to the same rule. Thus APM could provide user licences to any consortium it was involved in without consulting the sponsors but the sponsors have to consult APM before they can enter any consortium agreements. Concerned that there were lots of restrictions on Sponsors but APM free to do what it likes.

Carolyn responded that APM own the IPR on the sponsors behalf. APM would also pay to exploit the IPR but agreed that this was not clear in the contract and would be remedied.

Concern was also expressed about what happens if APM folds. In the previous contract the clause on closing stated that the IPR would then belong to sponsors. With the new contract the IPR would go to creditors rather than sponsors. Carolyn suggested a clause be added stating that if APM folds existing sponsors get all IPR , including pre DIMMA, any new sponsors only get IPR generated post DIMMA . This was agreed.

It was felt that a flow diagram or equivalent would help to clarify the general IPR situation. The situation is as follows:

Existing Sponsors:

Can use IPR for internal use (this applies to all companies in the group with same VAT number)

Can supply IPR as background in collaborative projects but need to notify the Business Advisory Board (BAB).

Can license IPR for exploitation at £45K per project.

If APM folds will get all IPR.

New Sponsors:

Can use IPR for internal use.

Can supply IPR as background in collaborative projects but need to notify BAB .

Can license IPR for exploitation at >£45K per project

If APM folds will only get post DIMMA IPR

Carolyn stressed the importance of agreeing the new contract in principle as there is an urgent need to get new sponsors in and this cannot be done with the current contract pair as 93 pages represents an insurmountaqble barrrier for most companies. ANSA lost £40K in 4 months due to the reduced sponsorship and APM cannot continue to subsidise the project at this rate as ANSA is currently run at cost, not at a profit.

The sponsors agreed to the implementation of the new contract subject to specific recommendations and amendments being taken into account from each sponsor.

ACTIONS

APM will circulate a new contract with changes requested at this meeting within next ten days.

Sponsor representatives to set up a meeting with their legal representative and Carolyn Story in the next three weeks to try to discuss any individual amendments to the contract.

If any amendments are suggested by the various legal representatives which affect the base contract and which need to be discussed by all a special meeting will be called.

The aim is to complete this process before the end of July 1997.

13 Any Other Business

There was no further business.