The Open Software Foundation is reportedly courting airline reservation system operator and transaction processing and networking software developer UAL Inc’s 50%-owned Covia Technologies Inc, based in Rosemont, Illinois. According to today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X, the Foundation is thought to want Covia’s pioneering transport-independent, networked transaction processing software, called the Communications Integrator, which runs across disparate hardware and network architectures. The Foundation would like to include Communications Integrator in its Distributed Computing and Management Environments. Covia says it is hesitant about becoming a member of the Foundation, although favourable negotiations are continuing. Reports from the US suggest that Covia’s software will also be snapped up by Sun Microsystems Inc, which could take the Communications Integrator OEM as an add-on to its Open Networking Computing environment. Covia, owned by a consortium of airlines including British Airways Plc alongside United Airlines UAL parent, pioneered the technology to convert transaction processing airline reservation applications across different hardware and networks. Covia has existing agreements with IBM Corp, Tandem Computers Inc, Digital Equipment Corp, NCR Corp and Unisys Corp for Communications Integrator – those versions are now in beta test, with NCR’s likely to be first out of the gate. Sun was expected to line up with the rest of the takers, but didn’t complete negotiations in time. The attraction of Communications Integrator is its power to talk across networking environments and incompatible machines without the need to recompile applications or protocols. It lies under the application but above the network protocol and isolates the application at a programming interface level and masks it from routing information, the operating system and network protocols. It interfaces the two layers, communicates to the underlying network protocols and drops the application into the network, Covia claims. It costs $750,000, with additional maintenance charges of $100,000 per machine type.
