October, 1996 NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre has announced that nine winners for the four year, $1.8 billion follow-on to the popular Software Engineering Workstation Procurement. SEWPII will provide up to 34,000 UNIX workstations, peripherals and networking components. The procurement called for products that implemented The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification. The companies named were Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Digital Equipment Corp., Government Technology Services Inc., Unisys, Compaq Computer Corp. and Sylvest Management Systems.

There are many other instances of open systems procurement policies, as evidenced by the increasing number of X/Open brand conformance requirements being issued by government and commercial entities worldwide.

For example, in 1996, after several years of study and system demonstration evaluations, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service published the comprehensive Open Systems Standards Profile, essentially a handbook on how to implement the standards and how to seek help in using them. The document includes a Target Standards List (standards obtainable within the next three to five years) and Interim Standards List (standards available today). The first resulting implementation, a U.S. Treasury Department distributed processing system contract, is scheduled to begin in July 1997.

Also in 1996, the U.S. Air Force announced its mandate of the X/Open brand in its $1.2 billion Desktop V procurement. This project comprises a number of systems, including notebooks, desktops and servers, with the total number amounting to 360,000 computers and 10,000 servers.

Other procurements that have named the X/Open brand as a minimum criteria for bid include the U.S. Air Force's ICARDS procurement for $932 million and Workstation procurement for an estimated $800 million, and the UK National Health Service procurement for $375 million.

More information on procurements can be found here