Tivoli Systems Inc has followed up its presentation to X/Open Co Ltd’s systems management working group the other week, by putting the application programming interface to version 2.0 of its distributed management environment into the public domain and announcing that binary and source code implementations of the Object Management Group Corba 1.1-compliant framework will be available by the end of this month or the beginning of February. Tivoli says that a slew of end-user TMF 2.0 implementations should be up and running by the end of the second quarter of the year. TMF 2.0, compatible with applications up under the existing 1.6 release, is to be extended or modified according to any changes required by X/Open – if indeed the specification makes it that far down the standards path. Answering critics of the nine-month-old TMF 2.0 application programming interface, Tivoli says 2.0 is not just 1.6 reworked to include Corba 1.1, but has additional security, customisation and automation facilities, reliable transaction retrievals, scalability and internationalisation. Tivoli hopes to draw OEM customers out of the woodwork by offering to license framework code for a fixed annual fee without per-copy royalties. The Austin, Texas-based company claims that it is already working on the integration of TMF 2.0 into a number of systems vendors’ object-oriented operating systems – such as those of SunSoft Inc, IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co – but is not naming any names. Current partners include Sun Microsystems Inc, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. TMF 2.0 will be up first under Solaris 2.3, SunOS 4.1.3, HP-UX 9.0, AIX 3.2.4, Data General Corp’s DG/UX 5.4, Motorola Inc’s Unix System V/88 and Windows NT. In addition to this, Tivoli says that it will be migrating customers and applications from the Novell Unix System Group’s now-abandoned System V.4 Distributed Manager framework to TMF 2.0 – see above. Tivoli says it is already discussing TMF interoperability with Novell’s Distributed Management System/AppWare, the system that the Unix owner has adopted over Distributed Manager.
