Still no sign of the long-anticipated upgrade to Entera, the remote procedure call-come-message-oriented middleware product that provoked the $40m buyout of Open Environment Corporation last November by Borland International Inc. No sign, that is, other than a passing reference as part of Borland’s introduction of Delphi Enterprise, the high-end, distributed version of its Pascal-based software development tool (CI No 3,288). The tool, typically costing around $45,000, exhibits a degree of scalability said to stem directly from its use of Entera. Back in May, Borland number two David Simone told our sister publication M&A Impact that work to upgrade the Entera product would continue apace. The software sits at the heart of business-critical production systems at SNET Telecommunications, Mobil, Ontario Hydro and Allied Signal, to name a few, and planned developments were supposed to result in version 4 being delivered by the end of 1997. So far though, other than a commercialization of the Open Environment AppMinder 3.0 application management tool for distributed components, and a new port of Entera to IBM Corp’s MVS/Open Edition for System 390 mainframes, the brunt of Borland’s OEC-oriented development work appears to have been directed towards internal product plans like the release of Delphi Enterprise.
