In line with chief executive officer Gilbert Amelio’s promise to make all Apple Computer Inc hardware Internet ready, Apple has extended its Open Transport architecture, which supports Point- to-Point protocol, in order to add an Apple-approved way of accessing multi-protocol networks, reports this week’s issue of Network Briefing. Prior to this, users have had to rely on shareware or freeware implementations of PPP to connect to non- Appletalk networks. The growth of TCP/IP-based networks has forced the company into reversing its previous coolness toward supporting links between AppleTalk and other protocols. The extension – Apple Open Transport/PPP 1.0 – is the first PPP implementation for MacOS that takes full advantage of the Open Transport networking and communications system while offering the performance and stability of native code running on PowerPC-based Macs, says Apple. The extension has been developed entirely within the company, it says, and is particularly useful for remote connection to TCP/IP networks or the Internet via a modem or ISDN terminal adapter through a Mac interface. The release marks the end of the second phase of the company’s Apple Remote Access road map announced in June (CI No 2,952). The two companies are also discussing the joint development of packages to support Tandem’s Internet Transaction Processing strategy. The Cupertino, California company is supposed to announce large scale data warehousing solutions as part of this strategy in the spring. ServerWare is the name Tandem is giving to the software it is stripping from its NonStop Himalaya range of parallel servers to run on NT servers. It does not require the ServerNet interconnect to be present. ServerWare products will include an NT version of the NonStop SQL clustered database, transaction services, the Message Switch Facility which will be used to distribute Java applets and other internet technologies, the object-relational DataBlade technology for use with Informix Corp’s Universal Server database plus support for the Wolfpack NT clustering interfaces Tandem is developing with Microsoft Corp. Tandem has created a new ServerWare business unit to peddle ServerWare from the second quarter of next year. Unisys, the first solutions partner for Tandem’s new unit, says the deal gives Tandem’s software strategy initial visibility and that they’ll be doing joint sales activities too. Tandem and Unisys are migrating to Unix and Windows NT and are quickly making themselves inessential except to the extent that they can add sufficient original value to prevent their customers defecting to the vendor of cheaper Unix and Windows NT systems down the road. Unisys has already bought into Data General Corp’s ccNUMA design for clustering Intel servers running UnixWare; it hasn’t yet detailed a strategy for NT clusters and while it is attracted to Tandem, says it will license other products where they exist too.
