The DM boot (Distributed Manager, not Doc Marten), looks as if it has swung to the other foot, with Tivoli Systems Inc now reported to be in the driving seat. Unix Systems Group will formally jettison Distributed Manager within 30 days, the technology having been spurned by new parent Novell Inc in favour of its own Novell Distributed Management Services. The plan for Tivoli’s rival, OpenVision Inc, to pick up the pieces of the deal once Unix Systems Group decided not to honour Distributed Manager pacts last October appears to be adrift. Tivoli is apparently expected to step into the frame any day now. Details of the new agreement have yet to be concluded, but Tivoli may take over a similar form of contract to the one that Unix Systems Group held with its Distributed Manager software partners – minus the outstanding financial obligations that have so provoked those application providers. The three companies, Unisys Corp, Pyramid Technology Corp and Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, once thought to be antagonistic towards the Tivoli technology, are seemingly now coming round to it. Distributed Manager is in any case a derivative of the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment 1.5, which, based on a previous version of the Tivoli framework, was bought outright by Unix Systems Group predecessor Unix System Laboratories specifically for Unix System V.4 systems – and reworked at considerable cost.
