OMG adopts mission-critical object services; Major vendors vow to build specification into products.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 10, 1995--The Object Management Group's board of directors has adopted the Common Object Services Specification Volume 2, (COSS 2), which will provide CORBA conformant ORBs with the services of Object Transactions, Externalization, Relationships and Concurrency Control.

"These new Object Services enable businesses to perform mission-critical tasks, such as transactions, in a robust distributed environment," commented Steve McClure, director of Object Technologies, International Data Corp.

"They specify how to build four basic services into a CORBA environment, which empowers IS departments to create enterprise-level solutions and frees them from the constraints of these services being exclusive to just a mainframe or a desktop."

COSS 2 is a compilation of specifications submitted by Groupe Bull, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICL, IONA Technologies, Novell, Olivetti, Siemens Nixdorf, SunSoft, Tandem Computers, Tivoli Systems and Transarc.

In accordance with OMG policy, all submissions were thoroughly evaluated by the Object Services Task Force, with guidance from the Object Request Broker Task Force, and were approved by the Technical Committee before being proposed for adoption by OMG's board of directors.

Vendors Vow Support for COSS 2

"The Object Transaction Service (OTS) will allow the building of coherent and reliable mission-critical applications based on the CORBA framework and the progressive and seamless integration of Object Technology with existing distributed TP applications," stated Herve Lejeune, OMG representative, Groupe Bull.

"Recognized as a key TP technology provider and committed to Object Technology, Groupe Bull will deliver an OTS product intended to be available on multiple CORBA platforms; a prototype was demonstrated at Object World San Francisco and Object World Germany in 1994."

"The addition of transactions to OMG's Object Management Architecture will make it possible to realize the benefits of object technology in the constructions of mission-critical applications," said Dr. Geoff Robinson, Director of IBM's Hursley Laboratory and the IBM executive responsible for transaction processing.

"IBM intends to incorporate this technology as part of its strategy for enabling object-oriented applications across the spectrum of its transaction-processing offerings."

"The Object Transaction Service represents an important advance in bringing object technology to the commercial marketplace," said Andrew Boswell, technical director, ICL. "ICL's customers include many of the large corporations who have been waiting for commercial-level resilience to be developed before committing themselves to investing in distributed object systems.

"Their plans for exploiting OMG's Object Transaction Service technology include the integration of legacy applications as well as making it the foundation of new, object-oriented solutions. This is a real breakthrough."

"The addition of the Object Transaction Service, as well as the other services in COSS 2, makes CORBA the undeniable solution for distributed object computing.

"The new functionality provided by these services make CORBA-conformant ORBs reliable enough for 7x24 applications and opens the world of transaction-heavy industries such as banks and airlines to the benefits of distributed object computing," stated Annrai O'Toole, founder and vice president, IONA Technologies Ltd. "IONA will take full advantage of the new COSS specification and will build these features into Orbix."

"We believe that a transaction manager provides the best foundation for mission-critical, client/server applications. By adding the Object Transaction Service, customers will be able to create these applications using a standard, object-oriented approach," said Joe Menard, vice president of Novell's TUXEDO Systems Group. "We are committed to having this technology available for the TUXEDO product line."

"Today's announcement is significant for all corporations implementing mission-critical transactions-based enterprise applications," commented Geoffrey Lewis, manager of business development for object products, SunSoft Inc. "The new OMG standard will enable users to build robust distributed object applications across heterogeneous computing platforms, and SunSoft is committed to providing this capability within the DOE networked object environment."

"The majority of Tandem's customers depend on enterprise scale, transaction-intensive applications. To meet their needs, Tandem has invested continuously in advancing parallel transaction-processing technology. The OTS is a key enabler for a new generation of mission-critical applications using distributed object technology.

"These applications will be adaptable to changing business needs, portable, and simpler to manage. To deliver these benefits to our customers and the industry, we made a significant investment in developing the OTS specification and in gaining its acceptance within the OMG," stated Bill Heil, vice president of product management, Tandem Computers.

"Tandem plans to implement the OTS and other technologies based on OMG specifications in a new family of component-based server software products. These products will broaden and simplify the use of transaction processing in distributed, mission-critical, applications, giving customers the scalability, data integrity, and availability they need to operate their business effectively."

"Distributed systems management is one of the key mission-critical application areas requiring services such as the Object Transaction Service provided by the COSS 2 specification," noted Tivoli Systems Inc. vice president of development Chris Grafft.

"Systems management tools must be able to perform transactions across the enterprise and the OTS provides this capability. Tivoli supports distributed nested transactions in its CORBA 1.1 compliant systems management product, the Tivoli Management Environment. We are glad to have been able to add what we have learned to the COSS 2 OTS specification."

Object Services and CORBA

Object Services are basic operations that need to be implemented in order to build robust distributed computing environments. OMG standardized Object Services connect directly to CORBA-conformant ORBs and therefore can be used by any and all stations in a networked distributed system.

CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is OMG's specification for portable and interoperable Object Request Brokers and is the leading standard messaging technology for heterogeneous distributed object computing.

Object Services, Object Request Brokers and Common Facilities are the three components of the Object Management Architecture (OMA) for which OMG is developing standards.

OMG believes wide-scale adoption of the OMA and its supporting interface specifications, such as CORBA and COSS, will provide product developers and technology users with the means to build heterogeneous software systems distributed across all major hardware, operating systems and language environments.

About OMG

OMG is the world's largest software development consortium with a membership of over 480 software vendors, software developers and end users. Established in 1989, its mission is to promote the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems. The goal is to provide a common architecture framework for object-oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications.

OMG is headquartered in Framingham and has international marketing offices in the UK, Germany and Japan. For information on joining OMG or additional information, please contact OMG headquarters by phone at [phone], by fax at [phone], or by email at: [e-mail].

CONTACT: Object Management Group

Kelley Lynn Kassa, 508/820-4300