OMG allies shatter standard ceasefire

The peace between the Object Management Group (OMG)and Microsoft over their rival distributed object standards was upset last week, when four leading OMG supporters joined forces in an alliance against the software giant.

At the Internet World show held in Los Angeles last week, Oracle, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced plans to collaborate on interoperability enhancements for the OMG?s Corba object request broker standard, and the Internet Inter-Orb protocol based on it.

But since the four partners are long-established supporters of Corba, the alliance was seen as a vehicle to beat off the threat from Microsoft?s rival technologies, Dcom and Active X.

Steve Mills, general manager of IBM?s software solutions division, admitted he wanted more firms to join the line-up. ?Our goal is for an industry groundswell,? he said. ?Broad market acceptance of standards will remove proprietary walls.?

Jerry Held, senior VP of server technologies at Oracle, said: ?The goal will be to make computing more easy and cost-effective.? He maintained that the alliance was to shore up and enhance Corba?s capabilities as an enterprise platform for distributed object implementations.

The announcement came one week after Microsoft signed a deal with Software AG to port Dcom to Unix platforms, as the company seems to be touting Dcom as an alternative industry standard in the internet arena. MS is a long-time OMG member, but has consistently refused to implement the group?s standards.

OMG president Chris Stone backed the alliance as a means of bringing distributed object technology to market. ?The work these companies do supports OMG objectives,? he said.

The alliance will submit their results to OMG by the end of this year for inclusion in future releases of the Corba specification.