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Computerworld - ORLANDO -- Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, CIO and director of architecture and integration for the U.S. Northern Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, was this morning's opening speaker here at the Storage Networking World conference. After his presentation, Meyerrose spoke with Computerworld about an IT strategy that supports sharing information with civil authorities as part of the Northern Command's homeland security mission.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

You said your main IT focus is on information sharing. What technologies do you need to standardize on in order to accomplish that? It's not specific technology, but families of technology. They have to be commercially available, and they have to be deployable on a wide, wide range and scale. If you think about it, there are two-and-a-half million first responders in the United States. Conceivably, there may be instances in which potentially every first responder in the entire United States might need to send information to me. With that kind of environment, if it's too complex or based on DOD [Department of Defense] encryption standards [for example], all of those elements end up being barriers. So open-system-type technologies as a family of technologies are the ones that are most helpful to us.

Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, CIO of the U.S. Northern Command

You said in your presentation that you see Unix as the "Betamax of software." Does that mean it has no place in your IT environment? It currently has a place, and in fact we do use Unix on several of the DOD systems. My thought behind Unix is the march of technology is what has made Unix less and less relevant. The Y2k rollover, in fact, killed lots of Unix. There are a finite number of Unix engineers and software writers in the world, and it is not big enough to support the information technology demands not only of our society, but of the world's economies in general. It costs a lot to train somebody; it takes many years to get them educated. It takes even more for them to get experience so that you can use them, when in fact a lot of software engineering and design is a lot less complicated and in my view will outpace Unix.

There are still lots of very important DOD Unix-based systems in existence. But I predict that five to 10 years from now, there may be almost no Unix-based systems, just because the intellectual investment it takes to maintain a cadre of Unix-trained, -educated and -experienced engineers is too difficult a problem.