Insession Inc, the Boulder, Colorado-based transaction processing integration company (CI No 3,255), is set to announce the latest deal in a string of OEM contracts for its TransFuse component- based accessware technology tomorrow (Wednesday). Transfuse has been licensed by Active Software, the Santa Clara, California- based software house set up in November 1995 by veterans of Sun Microsystems Inc’s distributed computing labs (CI No 3,290). It will be integrated within Active’s Integration System, a network- based set of software products for integrating client/server applications, legacy systems and databases through publish and subscribe procedures. The addition of Transfuse within Active’s Mainframe Adapters means that transaction processing applications such as IBM’s CICS, IMS and MQSeries, Tandem Computer Inc’s Pathway and BEA Systems Inc’s Tuxedo can either respond to (subscribe) or initiate the transfer of data (publish) to other applications, so that mainframe resources can be made available on line to distributed Unix and NT-based systems. Eight year-old Insession, formed originally from a group of Tandem Computers Inc employees that had been working on object-based transaction monitors, has signed up Netscape Communications Corp, Inprise International Inc (previously known as Borland), Netdynamics Inc and Sybase Inc (for use in Jaguar) to use its technology over recent months. Tandem is also understood to have signed up, although the announcement hasn’t yet been made. The Active Software deal adds publish and subscribe set-ups to the DCOM and Corba-based systems that Transfuse already supports, and adds an aggressive OEM to Insession’s list. The company’s VP of marketing, Richard Buckle, claims TransFuse offers a fourth alternative to screen scrapers and terminal emulation products, TP monitors with exposed APIs, and object-based TP systems from the likes of Iona Technologies Inc. With TransFuse, object technology is used to deploy TP up to the gateway, and true TP is used from gateway to host. It currently supports five TP monitors, with two more on the way, and numerous object request brokers. DCOM support was also added in May. TransFuse has only been on the market within real products for around four months, but Insession has the luxury of a worthy-but-dull proprietary Tandem protocol stack business it conducts entirely through one of Tandem’s largest distributors, Applied Communications Inc of Omaha, Nabrasca, which amounts to around $20m business annually. Insession claims to have a dozen OEM partners signed up to date, and has no plans to sell direct itself. Active is expected to have completed its integration with TransFuse within the next two months.
