Java publish-and-subscribe outfit Open Horizon Inc believes it’s the first middleware vendor to get the green light from the US Commerce Department to export 56-bit encryption technology without having to provide a key recovery plan that enables third parties to get access to the encrypted data. It’s a big deal, Open Horizon thinks, in view of the European financial institutions it’s lined up to use the encryption-enabled version of its Ambrosia publish and subscribe system to develop global financial services applications. Certainly its main competitors, Tibco Inc and Vitria Inc don’t have the same rights. It had to prove to the NSA that Ambrosia’s encryption engine is integral to the application, has no API, and cannot be unbundled. Most other licences granted by NSA require that companies provide a key recovery plan for use with their products by the end of 1999 so the agency can get access to encrypted data if it wants to. Open Horizon, which has all but clammed up about its business model, says it will ship a 3.0 version of Ambrosia next quarter. It’s been working with Sun Microsystems Inc on the nascent Java Messaging Server APIs which have yet to be made public. Ambrosia was developed with funding from investors including major stockholder PeopleSoft Inc so it should come as no surprise to anyone if Ambrosia ends up plumbed through-and-through the company’s ERP application. Open Horizon, DCE middleware maven- turned-Java acolyte – says it’s getting revenue from OEM and ISV licensing. Its web sites lists partnerships with Arcom, HP, IBM Information Builders, Informix, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Phillips, Sun, Sybase and USoft. Open Horizon says that in tests the beta version of Ambrosia 3.0 supported 15,000 concurrent users and 5,000 messages per second. It says its central message broker is not based on OMG Corba and permits central enforcement of message routing and security, eliminating the need for client- side processing daemons to filter all the messages, as in a bus architecture. It claims this means an organization can enforce policies uniformly. Ambrosia costs $5,000 per developer and $15,000 for a deployment system.
