Netscape Communication Corp’s equity in Visigenic wasn’t revealed, and the dollar amount it is investing was masked by lumping it together with investments from Cisco Systems Inc and Platinum Technology Inc. Together the three are putting $8m into the privately-held company for less than 10%, said founder Roger Sippl. It is believed Netscape has the lion’s share of the points. Visigenic will not need the whole $8m to pay for PostModern Computing Inc, whose impending takeover was announced las t month. The rest of the money, Visigenic’s third round, will be used to fund growth. Technically, the Netscape-Cisco-Platinum investments are not tied to using Visigenic software, which is covered by separate licensing arrangements. However some ar e dubious that Netscape will pay any more for the technology than its investment in Visigenic. Both Cisco and Platinum are using Visigenic Object DataBase Connectivity code in their core products: Cisco to enable its network management products to c reate repositories of network data from any Object DataBase Connectivity database, not just Sybase. Platinum is using its OpenChannel Object DataBase Connectivity-compliant database communications software in its POEMS messaging technology. More int erestingly, Cisco aims to stick PostModern’s stuff in its routers to do object passing on the network, currently the task of servers, thereby creating a new class of intelligent devices. However it is not exactly sure how all this will be done. It m ay also be one answer to what is becoming a major problem, namely that IIOP – Internet Inter-ORB Protocol – is not understood by the majority of Internet-intranet firewalls. It expects other Cisco technologies to flow back into Visigenic as a result of its investment. Firms like Shiva Corp are also expected to use Corba in their widgets. Meantime, Visigenic has licensed the source code to JavaSoft Inc’s Java Data Base Connectivity application programming interface test suites to certify its pr oducts comply with JDBC as well as the Java and Object Data Base Connectivity bridge, which provides Java applets with access to Open Database Connectivity-compliant databases.
