International Business Machines Corp, Armonk, New York, is buying long time Smalltalk technology partner Object Technology International Inc, Ottawa, Ontario, for an undisclosed sum. OTI, which will be operated as a subsidiary of IBM Canada, started working with IBM in 1988, eventually licensing its Smalltalk software for use in big blue’s graphical VisualAge language tools in 1993. Founder David Thomas will remain president and CEO of OTI, reporting to John Swainson, VP Application Development Solutions at IBM’s Toronto-based Software Solutions Division. OTI will retain all 110 employees. OTI says its Smalltalk virtual machine and class libraries will run on everything from set-tops to mainframes and is also used in the leading Unix Smalltalk platforms including ParcPlace-Digitalk’s VisualWorks (also the basis of Hewlett-Packard Co’s Distributed Smalltalk). OTI expects mainframe and AS/400 cuts of VisualAge Smalltalk products. Thomas rejects the notion that Java will eventually deep six Smalltalk; they’re virtually the same under the hood, he argues. What Java really threatens he says, is Visual C++-type environments.
