Open Software Foundation founder members Hitachi Ltd and Hewlett-Packard Co are to enhance the organisation’s one-year-old Distributed Computing Environment. Both companies have already shipped versions of the software, but both see the need to improve performance. Hitachi is to contribute its Heterogeneous Data Base Access Function, which provides interoperability between various Distributed Computing Environment and Unix-based databases and Distributed System Automatic Operation Function, which notifies the system manager of, and provides a response for, system failure. Hewlett-Packard is contributing multi-threaded safe libraries and Distributed Message System Function, a message management system for distributed environments. The results will appear on both vendors’ Unix systems in 1994 – Hitachi is a licensee of Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture and is a sponsor member of the Precision RISC Organisation. The companies view this effort as working towards the success of their co-operation over the Precision Architecture RISC chip and a better range of distributed applications services and tools for their customers in a client-server environment. Hitachi has been talking about a Unix mainframe using the RISC for a couple of years now, but is using a Sparc front-end for OSF/1 Unix on its existing mainframes (CI No 2,144).
