WS-I Announces Board Nominations

Six companies, including Sun Microsystems, were nominated for two seats on the organization's board of directors.

The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) Wednesday announced the nominations for two openings on the organizations board of directors.

WS-I officials said representatives from Cape Clear Software Inc., Nokia Corp., SeeBeyond Technology Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., VeriSign Inc. and webMethods Inc. have been nominated for election to the organizations board of directors.

The limited number of nominees means a better possibility for Sun to join the board, where many—including company insiders—have, since the inception of WS-I a year ago, said Sun rightfully belongs. Sun cleared the way for joining WS-I in October after much wrangling, finger pointing and murmuring regarding Suns role as an innovator in the world of Web services.

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WS-I officials said elections will be held in mid-March, with the results being announced March 28 and the new directors beginning their one- to two-year terms on April 1, 2003.

A WS-I spokeswoman explained that the newly elected board members would have tenure of one or two years. The usual term for an elected board member is two years, and founding members such as IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. are permanently in position.

"The basic story is that there will be two directors elected," a WS-I spokeswoman said. "The one with the fewer votes during the March election receives a 12-month term. The one with the most votes receives the standard 24-month term. The usual term for an elected director is 24 months. This start up aberration is in place so that we can establish a staggered election schedule were one director position is filled each year."

The nominated companies and individuals are: Jorgen Thelin, chief scientist at Cape Clear; Juhani Murto, senior manager of Web services architecture at Nokia; Ugo Corda, principal standards analyst at SeeBeyond; Mark Hapner, distinguished engineer and chief Web services strategist at Sun; Sundar Krishnamurthy, a product manager at VeriSign; and Andy Astor, vice president of Enterprise Web Services at webMethods.

Many consider Sun a shoo-in, but others such as Cape Clear and webMethods weighed in early, claiming that smaller companies are underrepresented on the board.

In a statement announcing Thelins nomination last month, Cape Clear said: "Jorgens candidacy is based on two core issues; firstly the need for the WS-I Board to represent the small and medium sized firms who make up over ninety percent of the membership and secondly to promote greater transparency and accountability from the Board to the WS-I membership."

More than 150 companies have joined WS-I since its formation last February.

WS-Is nine founding members are Accenture Inc., BEA Systems Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

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