As part of its broad set of products and alliance unveiled earlier this month, Digital Equipment Corp has signed for Transarc Corp’s Encina transaction processing monitor, which will go up under OSF/1 on Alpha AXP RISC systems in three separate guises, and marketed alongside the Novell Inc Tuxedo and VISystems Inc’s CICS-compatible VIS/TP transaction monitors that DEC already offers. Specifically, DEC has licensed Transarc’s version of the Encina Core services – at least the tool kits and structured file server – and the resulting production binaries. Transarc has been working on the OSF/1-Alpha implementation of its Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment for some time. DEC will use the Transarc code to develop a version of its ACMSxp monitor that will sit on top of core Encina services – it will also offer the Transarc-based IBM AIX CICS/6000 monitor via an agreement with IBM Corp. In parallel, Transarc will sell a version of its existing Encina transaction processing monitor for OSF/1 on Alpha systems. All will be available during the second half of the year. Encina Monitor includes the full Encina set – tool kits, structured file server, recoverable queuing service and peer-to-peer communications. ACMSxp will include only the first two – though support for the rest may follow, and CICS/6000 comes without the recoverable queuing service. Under the deal, DEC has rights to offer implementations of its Transarc-based ACMSxp for other systems and says it will deliver a Windows NT developers kit for Alpha customers by the end of the year which will enable users to test the transaction processing environment under NT. Transarc plans to offer a full-blown version of Encina for NT thereafter, which will enable independent software vendors to convert transaction processing applications to run under Encina implementations for the Microsoft Corp environment. DEC says that it will continue to market Tuxedo on its OSF/1 and Ultrix operating systems, though Transarc is confident that installations based on Encina – ACMSxp, CICS and the Encina monitor – will soon predominate. When all three support a compliant version of the TX-RPC transaction processing interface contained in the Distributed Computing Environment – expected next year – then applications will be able to move between the different implementations, across distributed environments. Transarc plans a slew of new components for Encina, including administration tools, in an upcoming partners programme it is putting together. Under plans to migrate its customers to a new network management system which eventually will see IBM’s NetView/6000 network management system up on DEC systems – DEC’s Polycenter Manager is now running on NetView V2.1.
