IBM, ORACLE, SUN AND NETSCAPE COLLABORATE ON STANDARDS
FOR NETWORK COMPUTING
Interoperability To Offer Customers Transparent Software
Integration Across Platforms
NEW YORK, March 11, 1997 ... IBM, Oracle, Sun and Netscape today
joined forces to work together on open standards for network computing, demonstrating cooperation among industry leaders. The widespread adoption of these standards will allow corporate customers to conduct electronic business without having to worry about the underlying technologies. Diverse Web-based technologies can be easily
integrated into enterprise applications, offering investment
protection, new flexibility and opportunities for significant
cost savings.
As corporations extend their businesses from the enterprise to
the Internet,they require industrial-strength reliability, functionality and interoperability -- a software infrastructure that is the equivalent of a dial-tone for the web. This unprecedented collaboration, which is open to broad industry participation, will join common interfaces, protocols, and procedures that will allow diverse software components to connect from clients to servers, through corporate intranets and extranets and the public Internet.
Building on the Object Management Group's CORBA(TM) and Internet
Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP)(TM) standards -- the glue that enables software from different vendors to work together seamlessly -- the planned levels of integration will allow the companies' software to work together as if it was created with the same development tools, in the same language, with the same runtime, on the same system.
"This initiative starts with four companies, but our hope is
that it becomes an industry groundswell," said Steve Mills,
general manager, IBM Software Solutions Division. "Broad market
acceptance of standards will remove proprietary walls and
other barriers to connectivity that our customers struggle with
today."
Interoperability will enable software developers to build new
applications by mixing and matching components created from a variety
of application development tools, technologies and platforms, including IBM's VisualAge(TM), Oracle's Network Computing Architecture
(NCA)(TM), Sun's Workshop(TM), WebServer(TM) and Solaris(TM) products,
and Netscape ONE (Open Network Environment).(TM)
"Ensuring a consistent approach in our products should help level
the software playing field and accelerate innovation within the
computing industry, and allow the vision of network computing to
become a reality," said Jerry Held, senior vice president of Server
Technologies for Oracle Corporation. "The goal of each company involved in this agreement will be to make computing easier and more cost effective for our customers and our partners."
"Using a computer should be just as easy as the telephone," said
Steve MacKay,vice president and general manager Solaris products, SunSoft."People should be able to safely and quickly get exactly the information they want or need any time, from any place in the world. To deliver this webtone requires an infrastructure that is even greater than the one used today by world's telephone companies. That's why Sun Software is part of this initiative."
Results of the collaboration, which will complement and enhance CORBA and IIOP, will be submitted to the Object Management Group beginning this year. Additionally, each of the four companies spearheading this initiative is expected to deliver the first products adheringto the interoperability standards, beginning with their next major release.
"Participation in this industry initiative will underscore Netscape's
commitment to open standards as a critical driver of the emerging
networked enterprise," said Rick Schell, senior vice president and
general manager, Client Product Division, at Netscape. "By establishing product interoperability as the platform for deploying intranet and extranet solutions, Netscape plans to help corporate customers preserve their investments in existing applications and corporate data, and integrate with a common network architecture."
"The work these companies expect to do supports OMG objectives and
leverages our standards initiatives by using CORBA and IIOP," said
Chris Stone, president and chief executive officer of the OMG.
"The commitment to help bring products to market from these vendors
will clearly help commercialize the Internet and distributed objects
as a viable computing model for the enterprise." |
