IBM Corp is said to be going to relieve the Open Software Foundation of one of its heaviest burdens and take over integration responsibilities for the Distributed Management Environment. The Software Foundation had originally planned to do the work internally, after none of its members or founders volunteered, scared off by IBM’s experience of integrating the Management Environment’s companion piece DCE, the Distributed Computing Environment. The Software Foundation and Tivoli Systems Inc, source of the Distributed Management framework, are said to have appealed to IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co after sensing a loss of interest in the Management Environment due to the slow progress. Tivoli Systems will remain what it always was, a sub-integrator of the systems management piece. All of the parties are interested in making the Distributed Management Environment more compliant with the Object Management Group’s Corba Commom Object Request Broker Architecture specification. Hewlett-Packard is understood to be contributing parts of its DOMF Distributed Object Management Facility and IBM parts of its SOM to the object core layer. It will be interesting to see whether Unix International follows suit.
