IBM is adding the Common Programming Interface for Communications to its OS/2 operating system. IBM analyst Anura Guruge, believes the CPIC announcement could prove to be of vital importance to IBM over the next couple of years. Guruge says CPIC is a vital element in IBM’s Co-Operative Processing Model and Common User Access Base and reckons the addition of OS/2 completes its spread throughout IBM’s most important systems. CPIC is regarded as key to opening up IBM networks to other vendors. Data General is one of the vendors that has announced support for the interface and IBM offers CPIC licences. CPIC provides a high-level interface to APPC Advanced Program-to-Program Communication. APPC is the foundation for IBM’s future networking products and is the programming interface to LU6.2, a data stream cum network operating system, linking mid-range machines without mainframe involvement. LU6.2 also supports store and forward networking. In Europe the addition of the standard is particularly interesting because it can be run on top of the Open Systems Interconnection distributed processing standard. According to Guruge, this means that IBM CPIC applications will be able to run on OSI networks as well as IBM’s Systems Network Architecture, in two to three years’ time. At the CPIC announcement, Ellen Hancock, head of IBM’s Communications Systems Line of Business identified Open Networking Management as a key goal for IBM. Common interfaces are no longer a luxury, but a necessity… we are committed to OSI, to an open SNA and to TCP/IP.
