Development Work Begins on DCE 1.2

Open Software Foundation and four companies describe project

The Open Software Foundation (OSF) has announced the beginning of work on the next release of the Distributed Computing Environment, giving DCE another push forward. The DCE 1.2 project, announced at OSF's DCE development conference in San Jose, CA, includes plans to give DCE improved coexistence with other network environments, improved administration, simplified program development, and improved scalability.

The schedule revealed by Scott Wang, chairman of DCE's project steering committee in OSF and R&D lab manager for Hewlett-Packard's open systems software division, calls for two releases of DCE 1.2-DCE 1.2.1 next October and DCE 1.2.2 in July 1996. The project is the first to be approved under OSF's prestructured technology (PST) process, devised last year to take the role of active developer away from OSF and give it to a team of companies. The joint sponsors of the new DCE 1.2 development project are Digital Equipment Corp., HP, Hitachi, and IBM.

DCE enables the use of distributed applications in cross-platform, multivendor environments. Organizations using DCE can build those applications and provide them across diverse networks. DCE also provides location-independent access to data and resources. DCE 1.0 was released in 1992 and DCE 1.1 was released in late 1994.

"As far as we're concerned, OSF DCE is the only game in town," said David Tory, OSF president and CEO, in his keynote address to the conference. If the definition of open systems is interoperability across heterogeneous environments, Tory said, "DCE represents the concept of open systems." Enterprise-wide systems from desktop machines to mainframes now need to be connected and "There is no other software that currently spans that environment," Tory said. In doing so, it helps companies change the basis of their IT infrastructure from vertical to horizontal.

Corporate investments in DCE technology are now taking place in companies like Boeing, Barclays Bank, and the Mitre Corp. "They [investments] have been happening for a long time, but now we're beginning to talk about them in real terms," Tory said.

Bill Estrem, end-user representative on the DCE PST committee and project leader of 3M Corp., a Minneapolis-based company that is evaluating DCE, said DCE 1.2 will be more scalable and more robust. As that happens, it's especially important for DCE to gain third-party vendor support, he added.

New Enhancements

Enhancements will include the following, according to OSF:

Current DCE Services

DCE currently consists of the following services derived from technologies contributed by DEC, IBM, HP, Siemens Nixdorf, Transarc, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others: Fred Luiz, general manager of HP's open systems software division, said HP is committed to DCE as a means of helping its customers integrate systems throughout their enterprises. Art Olbert, vice president of LAN systems at IBM, called DCE directory and security services "key building blocks that provide customers with the ability to do true distributed computing in an open environment."

Tory expects one of the results of OSF's slimmed-down staffing and new role under PST to be that by the time a project starts, OSF will not only have the funding but will know the product is going to be used at the other end. One of the organization's major goals is to accelerate the rate of identifying new technology for development and ensuring the most efficient, cost-effective delivery of it.

He urged developers to become a part of regional end-user and ISV forums to influence OSF's projects. "You've got to participate, you've got to talk, and you've got to interact," Troy said.