Continuing its energetic campaign to win itself a position where it can challenge Microsoft Corp for domination of the fastest-growing segments of the computer market, Novell Inc has moved to get transaction processing support added to the NetWare operating environment, choosing newcomer Cooperative Solutions Inc of San Jose as its partner in the venture, making an investment in the company to cement the deal. Cooperative is the developer and marketer of Ellipse, claimed to be the first multi-user development and system software environment for client-server transaction processing applications. The aim is to develop a NetWare environment that will tempt mainframe users to migrate their applications down to client-server networks under Novell’s network operating system. Under the agreement, Cooperative Solutions and Novell will collaborate on converting Ellipse to run under NetWare – and clearly the work has been under way for a long time on the quiet, because Ellipse will be available to NetWare users with MS-DOS and Windows or OS/2 clients later this quarter, and will use NetWare Named Pipes requestor technology. A native NetWare implementation will be available at a later date. Shipping since September under Windows 3.0 and OS/2, Ellipse is designed to enable developers with no experience of client-server computing or transaction processing to develop and deploy transaction processing applications on client-server combinations in short order. Applications include billing, accounts receivable, order entry, customer service, inventory and distribution. Applications developed with Ellipse can run in a number of target environments, independent of operating system, graphical user interface, hardware, Structured Query Language database management system or communication software, Cooperative claims. The Novell equity investment is part of more than $15m in venture funding raised by Cooperative Solutions, which says that it plans to use the funds to expand sales, support and consulting services and for expanding into the European market this year.
