There was some good news at last for the 400,000 or so users of Digital Equipment Corp’s unfashionable OpenVMS proprietary operating system yesterday, with the announcement of two ports from open systems software houses. BEA Systems Inc said it had ported its Tuxedo transaction processing monitor to the operating system, and would release it by the end of the year. And IBM Corp’s Tivoli Systems Inc said it would be demonstrating its first VMS product, a combination of its own WorkLoad Scheduler with Heroix Corp’s Robomon and RoboCentral and Datametrics Systems Corp’s Viewpoint. It’s intended as a migration and upgrade path for users of Digital’s PolyCenter systems and network management suite for VMS. Industry observers suspect that OpenVMS will face a future of ever dwindling resources under the ownership of Compaq, which also has its mainstream Intel server business, DEC’s Alpha-based NT and Unix servers, and Tandem Computers Inc’s proprietary and Unix server ranges to try and fit together into some sort of coherent strategy. With the addition of VMS versions, both Tuxedo and the Tivoli software package now span all of those platforms, which might help a little with inevitable integration and migration tasks Compaq faces.
