Roger Sippl’s Visigenic Inc has garnered a $8m in another round of funding, this time from the sale of stock to Cisco Systems Inc, Netscape Communications Corp and Platinum Technology Inc. Some of it will be used to complete the acquisition of object request broker (ORB) company PostModern Computing Inc, announced last month (CI No 2,906). Cisco, the fast-growing network company based in Menlo Park, California, says it has already completed the integration of Visigenic’s ODBC drivers with its network management products, allowing customers to create repositories of network data using any ODBC database and not just the Sybase Inc database they must use at present. More interesting, but also further out, is Cisco’s plan to integrate PostModern’s C++ and Java ORB technologies into future router products. Cisco says it’ll allow routers to take over the management of object requests generated by distributed clients that would conventionally have to be passed back to a server before being sent on. Cisco believes the level of intelligence currently built into routing devices is still very basic and that the technology is still at an early stage of development. It sees routers evolving into intelligent network devices and the term router, from the packet forwarding and routing tasks original devices performed, becoming a misnomer. Cisco says it’s only just begun to investigate exactly how the ORB technology will be implemented in its routers. It expects other Cisco technologies to flow to Visigenic in future as a result of its investment. Platinum Technology Inc has already begun integrating Visigenic’s ODBC-based OpenChannel database connection suite into its OEMS (Open Enterprise Management System) messaging technology. Netscape is expected to leverage the ODBC drivers and ORB technology for its Intranet products. Meantime Visigenic has licensed the source code to JavaSoft’s Java database connectivity (JDBC) API test suites to certify its products comply with JDBC as well as the JDBC/ODBC bridge, which provides Java applets with access Open Database Connectivity-compliant database.
