Microsoft Takes on COM Support

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Al Gillen

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Nearly a year after promising that COM support would be provided aboard a variety of non-Microsoft platforms by other vendors -- some of whom have yet to deliver -- Microsoft Corp. will bite the bullet and deliver COM support for UNIX users.

Last May, Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates announced that COM support would be delivered aboard Digital Equipment Corp.'s OpenVMS and UNIX systems, IBM Corp.'s MVS and Hewlett-Packard Co.'s HP-UX UNLX environment. To date, support for COM aboard IBM MVS and Sun Solaris has been delivered by Software AG (Darmstadt, Germany), but none has arrived for HP-UX or for other UNIX environments.

During a keynote speech delivered at Microsoft's Web Tech-Ed event, Bob Muglia, Microsoft vice president of server applications, announced the company would step up its efforts to make COM available on multiple platforms. But, in a departure of past initiatives where Microsoft waited for other vendors to make the investment in COM, Microsoft plans to invest staffing and development resources in COM for UNIX. Microsoft will get the core COM-on-UNIX components from Software AG through a technology sharing arrangement. Software AG ported COM to UNIX last year.

In parallel to the Microsoft announcement, Digital announced it is finally nearing the release of COM services for its OpenVMS platform. The company says it currently has a two-customer beta program underway. Digital will follow the OpenVMS program with a Digital UNIX test program, and expects both products to enter availability later this year.

Microsoft's Muglia also says Microsoft will offer COM products to IBM AIX, Digital UNIX, HP-UX and Sun Solaris environments. However, Microsoft will stop short of delivering implementation services aboard those systems. Instead, it will partner with consulting companies such as EDS (Plano, Texas), KPMG (New York) and Vanstar Corp. (Atlanta). "There [is] a lot of existing software on those platforms," observes Muglia. "So we're partnering with a number of third-party [consultants] to help encapsulate those objects in COM."

In addition, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI, Mountain View, Calif.) announced a deal under which SGI will license COM technology from Microsoft and will integrate it into its IRIX operating systems.

Further broadening the adoption of COM is a surprising announcement by Microsoft and CORBA proponent Iona Technologies Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.) that Iona licensed COM technology from Microsoft. The agreement is targeted at enabling CORBA and COM interoperability. Says Muglia, "This is a huge step forward because the underlying services for transactional operations will become available to CORBA. This marks the beginning of the end for the gap between COM and CORBA."

Joe Maloney, group marketing manager for Microsoft's applications and Internet client group, explains, "Iona is taking and licensing the code for integreation into their product. Iona will be using existing versions of COM because they are already there."

Microsoft hopes support from Redmond will encourage the cross-platform adoption of COM. "The support issue is a huge one. Somebody can actually call Microsoft and get support [for COM on UNIX]," says Maloney.