The newest member of the Open Group today is Sun Microsystems today, in its latest effort to become recognized as the pinnacle of the open source community.

The Open Group is an organization aimed at the "creation of Boundaryless Information Flow," which is the stated ideal of being able to serve information throughout an enterprise in the context that each user specifically requires, without running into incompatibilities or interoperability problems.

"Until recently, the concept of an enterprise IT architecture was a vision shared by very few organizations," reads one portion of the Open Group's mission statement. "Today, many organizations have achieved a degree of boundarylessness between their people, only to find that the stovepipes are even stronger in the IT systems. This is not surprising, given that these systems were built with the purpose that they would only support the needs of a single department, and did not foresee situations where they would need to integrate information and share with the systems of other departments or with strategic partners in the extended enterprise."

Sun's new level of participation will allow the company to work on the Architecture Framework (TOGAF), IT Architect Certification (ITAC), and IT Specialist Certification (ITSC), which are open projects designed to help companies become more efficient by following best practices and guidelines. The TOGAF framework is especially interesting as it allows companies to create their own enterprise architecture without contracting the job out or relying on another company for assistance. At the same time, compliance with TOGAF makes companies eligible for assistance with training and education.

Sun's platinum level participation in The Open Group is not surprising since the company is an ardent supporter of opening up its technologies for the free and open source (FOSS) community.

Sun joins Capgemini, EDS, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM and NEC as platinum members of The Open Group. Other members of the group include the US Department of Defense, NASA, Hitachi, and more than 250 other companies pushing for open source and open standards in today's enterprise workspace.