Having got its object database and services woven throughout Novell Inc’s next-generation products, Poet Software Corp is getting its foot under Redmond’s door. Starting softly softly it has become a member of Microsoft Corp’s third party enterprise developer group by dint of its extension of Microsoft’s Visual Studio programming tools to work with the Post Object Server, SQL Object Factory object-relational tool and Web Factory on Windows NT. Next week it’ll announce BackOffice certification. This, Poet hopes, will ultimately lead to a bundling deal it claims to be in talks with Microsoft for. The way Poet hears, any plans Microsoft’s may have to develop its object-relational extensions for SQL Server are at least two years away from implementation. Redmond’s supposedly content to watch the existing object- relational crowd slugging it out for blood and honor before making a move and is in any case busy with scalability issues. Poet thinks that when it makes its move it will follow the Computer Associates International Inc and Sybase Inc models, and provide a more unified interface to either object or relational data stores. Of course Poet would love that interface to be its SQL Factory, which can direct applications to object or relational stores at runtime. Other object-relational technologies are language and data store-specific, it claims. Microsoft currently uses Object Design Inc’s ObjectStore PSE Java database for its Java store requirement. Poet still can’t talk about its work with Novell, lest it spill Eric Schmidt’s beans, but under the expanded licensing arrangement what aren’t they going to do with it? is how Poet says we should think about it. Novell holds $6.5m Poet stock.
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