Candle Corp says it is getting increasingly frustrated with Microsoft Corp’s skulduggery over the transfer of ActiveX technologies to an independent standards body (CI No 2,966). Candle’s problem is a shelf full of new object and Internet management products it has created that will supposedly enable users to define management objects in one domain, such as Object Linking & Embedding, and re-use them in another. It can’t begin to shift product until it knows how Microsoft’s object cookie will crumble: what’s in Object Linking & Embedding and ActiveX and what’s not, and how and if the pieces will work with Corba and other services such as transaction processing. Let’s either do the whole [ActiveX] thing or declare it dead and move on, says Candle vice-president of solutions management research and development Andy Mullins.

Drill down facilities

Meantime, Candle says there’s a ton of applications management holes it must fill by development or acquisition, including full end-to-end and drill down facilities. It plugged one hole last week by licensing Tivoli Systems Inc’s application development environment tool-kits to integrate the TME 10 framework into Command Center products. Users will be able to share data between both companies’ system frameworks and interface Candle systems with Tivoli-based modules from independent software vendors. Candle will embed code from Tivoli’s framework into Command Center architecture. Craggs says about 85% of its mainframe customers have both Candle and Tivoli systems and about 20% to 30% of its client-server users do as well, so interoperability was an obvious move. Candle says the first level of the agreement is bi-directional capability, so that an event monitored by a Tivoli product will also be passable to Command Center. By the first half of 1997 it will have achieved framework-to- framework linkage so that any application in a Tivoli domain will be accessible for Command Center. Fresh from its Tivoli agreement, Candle has struck a deal with Unison Software Inc to build an interface to its Maestro job scheduling, workload balancing and back-up restoration software. The contract is expected to be officially announced in the fourth quarter and includes a provision for Candle to act as reseller for Unison products. Candle says it will seek more reseller agreements in the future to make its direct sales efforts more comprehensive.