"Computers should be used to help people work together, not apart."

Ram Sudama: DCE Defender

Open Environment v.p. champions open systems, open society

By Richard Cole

Ram Sudama is a soft-spoken man, but he speaks his mind loud and clear. He recently met one of the major players in the computer industry, a man who had been intimately involved with the birth and development of PCs. In the middle of their discussion, Sudama had to tell him that he found the very term "personal computer" to be highly offensive.

"The idea that a single person should have all the power they need on their desktop is exactly the opposite of where I would like to see the technology move," he says. Computing technology, he asserts, should be used to help people communicate with each other and work together, not apart or in isolation.

Open Systems and Societies

"I definitely believe in team-oriented activities," Sudama says, explaining his focus on open computing. "The concept of sitting in a closet someplace with a 'gigamips' machine and all the data on your CD-ROM is contrary to the concept of openness and sharing which is essential, I feel, to building a strong society."

Part of Sudama's interest in open systems and societies might be traced back to his childhood. As the son of a U.S. Naval officer, he grew up moving from one new "environment" to another, assimilating himself into new schools, new friends, and new attitudes. This assimilation continued into adulthood; his name is adopted, based on his beliefs in Yoga philosophy.

His position as someone slightly outside the mainstream helped him recognize from an early age the social and cultural distinctions that can serve as barriers in society. He also saw that when these barriers are lowered, different ideas and perspectives can be used together for everyone's benefit.

With such a background, it makes sense that Sudama has made a career out of working with communications, networking and distributed, client/server computing. "My interest in developing that sort of technology is an outgrowth of the kind of society I'd like to see."

It also makes sense that he should now find himself working with the Boston-based Open Environment Corporation on their Entera product, a suite of tools for the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (OSF DCE).

From Carpentry to Computers

Sudama first encountered computers at the National Technological University, Ft. Collins, CO, where he earned a masters in computer science. For a while after college, he worked as an audio engineer, studying how computers could be used as a means of recording and processing sound. However, his main reason for choosing a career in IT had more to do with the Boston winters.

For several years, he labored outdoors in the Boston area as a construction carpenter. Trying to swing a hammer with frozen fingers in the middle of January convinced him that working indoors on computers was actually a pretty good way to make a living. "Some people who come out of college directly into hi-tech may complain about their jobs," he says. "I'd recommend a good dose of manual labor to anyone who thinks life is a burden in the IT world."

After brief stints at several small technology companies, he signed on at Digital. "I didn't really have a clearly defined career goal at that time," he says. "Digital looked good because I had used their gear and considered it to be tops. I simply wanted to learn how to build products like that."

After 12 years, Sudama was head of their DCE development efforts. At the same time, a company called Open Environment was making a name for itself with tools for DCE. Sudama explains that the move to Open Environment was a logical extension of the work he was doing at Digital. "I knew what they were doing, and they knew what I was doing. It was a natural fit."

Starting with Open Environment

Open Environment Corporation is a spin-off of Cambridge Technology Group (CTG, Cambridge, MA. Founded by Dr. John Donovan, CTG offers seminars, lectures, and classes to business executives, helping them understand new developments in information technology and how it can make their corporations more successful.

"A lot of the technology for Open Environment was developed at CTG," says Sudama. "In 1992, CTG felt it was time to incorporate Open Environment as a separate entity, concentrating on software products rather than education."

Sudama joined the staff in 1993, just in time to help Open Environment make the shift from education to software. This was a radical change for the company. For the first two years of its existence, it had continued to offer courses along the lines of CTG, funding research and development from their education revenues. "Open Environment didn't begin with millions of dollars in venture capital," Sudama says. "They had to bootstrap themselves and develop their technology with their own resources."

By 1994, however, the company had made the transition to software. Now over 80 percent of their revenue comes from software sales. Overall revenues have risen from 3.3 million in 1992 to 14 million in 1994. "We currently have about 100 customers who are actively using our software technology and building production applications," Sudama reports.

Last year, Open Environment also transformed itself into an international company. In 1994, they were still primarily a Boston-based concern. Today, more than 40 percent of their revenue comes from overseas. Open Environment has offices in London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Sydney, Australia. They also have partnerships in Japan, Korea, and India which are devoted to developing marketing, sales and education with local companies. "We want to develop international markets by training people and having them develop their own markets, rather than trying to do that ourselves from the U.S."

Educating the Customer

Today, Sudama serves as vice president of technology and chief scientist of Open Environment. He spends a considerable amount of his time traveling around the world, promoting an open, DCE-based approach to business computing.

Part of his job involves teaching, and education remains an important part of Open Environment. They now have what they call The Learning Center which is a catalogue of classes, audio and video instruction tapes, and computer-based training.

"Early on," he says, "we realized that many people who might benefit from distributed technology don't know how to start." Educational offerings are designed for everyone from accomplished engineers to virtual novices.

"We consider a comprehensive education in our products and the technology as an important part of the marketing and sales cycle," Sudama explains.

Entera and DCE

The main focus of Open Environment remains software development and sales, specifically their Entera family of products. Entera works with DCE and, Sudama claims, alleviates many of the headaches and complexities associated with this middleware technology from OSF.

DCE is designed to provide vendor-neutral middleware standards for client/servers in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. DCE technology is made up of a remote procedure call (RPC) for communications, a distributed file service, a distributed time service that synchronizes all the clocks on each computer in the DCE network, security functions, and a cell directory service. It also has threading for server multitasking.

Ideally, DCE supports interactions between clients and servers through the network or networks. This means that with DCE, users can communicate and work together across very large, distributed, heterogeneous environments.

In reality, however, DCE cannot shake a reputation as a hard-to-work-with, "immature" technology that still hasn't fully delivered on its promise. What's more, these difficulties have been widely reported in the press with varying measures of glee, resulting in one of Sudama's biggest pet peeves when it comes to open systems (see box).

Critical Response

Sudama meets DCE's critics head on. He concedes that DCE can be complex. After all, it was originally designed to be used by sophisticated C programmers. Besides, the marriage between large, heterogeneous environments has never been simple or easy.

But Sudama explains that tools like Entera can be layered on top of DCE to simplify and automate its use. This means that developers can create applications that are targeted to DCE without having to worry about DCE complexities.

He adds, "We try to make it as simple as possible. That's one of the basic values that open systems has brought to the market, trying to make things easy to work with."

Critics also contend that DCE doesn't do the very thing it was designed most to do: deliver full interoperability and connectivity across a range of hardware platforms and operating systems. Sudama counters by pointing out that DCE now enjoys the support of nearly every major system vendor--including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corp., Siemens-Nixdorf, Microsoft, AT&T, Tandem and Transarc--plus a slew of ISVs.

As a result, DCE can now support a large number of different computer systems, databases, graphical user interfaces, and legacy applications, Sudama says. With Entera, users can build distributed complements of an application using several languages including Smalltalk, C++, COBOL, C, Visual Basic and PowerScript. At the same time, a Unix server can communicate to an NT server, a Macintosh client with an NT server, an OS/2 client with a Unix server, or a Windows client with a VMS server.

Future Predictions

So will 1995 be the year of DCE? Well, actually, no, Sudama says. "DCE is a little bit ahead of its time, I think." But he's willing to bet on 1996. "Several deployments are coming out this year that will be widely publicized," he says. "Next year, having seen these deployments, people will probably be willing to do DCE on a much larger scale."

Of course, that prediction sounds like the same prediction DCE supporters made last year, and the year before that. But Sudama argues that the future of distributed computing is inevitable. "Our only option is going back to mainframes." He also feels that DCE will be at the center of distributed environments. "The only question about DCE is how and when the technology will become widespread."

The benefits of DCE are obvious, he says. One example is multithreading. "You simply can't build large-scale, robust applications without it." He mentions DCE's common security mechanism that supports authentication, authorization, and data encryption. "A lot of people don't realize the extent that security will be required in tomorrow's distributed environments." He also lists DCE support for object management. "If you have distributed objects everywhere," he says, "you're going to have a distributed mess everywhere unless you have the proper management tools."

According to Sudama, a lot was built into DCE technology by people who had a "deeper knowledge" of technology requirements than the market at large. "Perhaps the market simply hasn't realized all these capabilities yet," he says, "but I have no doubt it will."

The eventual recognition of DCE is important to Sudama. Of course, the fortunes of Open Environment are intimately linked to the technology. But Sudama also believes that distributed computing technology has the ability to change the way we live. "In a society as large and complex as today's world society, we need the right technology in order to function effectively. I think distributed computing can and will, in fact, improve the quality of life for literally everybody in the world."

Click here for personality profile of Ram Sudhama.