The Ask Group Inc has also expanded its strategic partnership with Sun Microsystems Inc with four separate product and marketing agreements between the two, covering the Ingres relational database, application development tools, manufacturing software and Sun’s full product line of Sparcstations and Sparcservers. The two companies will co-operate to tune the Ask applications to run on Sun hardware under the Solaris operating system, and to provide customer support. Benchmark tests and co-operative engineering are also in the pipeline. And at the AutoFact exhibition in Chicago, the two said they would be jointly delivering distributed client-server products to the manufacturing industry, based on Ask’s ManMan/X product. An agreement between Ask and SunSoft Inc will concentrate on converting Ask Ingres products for Solaris x86 for Intel-based systems. Finally, Ask has agreed to join up with SunSelect in supporting the Public Windows Interface initiative, Sun’s attempt to bring the application programming interfaces for Microsoft Corp’s Windows into the public domain. Other supporters of the Initiative include American Airlines, Borland International, Wordperfect, Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Norwegian Telecom.
