Database giant Oracle Corp said yesterday that it has signed a multimillion-dollar licensing deal with development tools vendor Inprise Corp, to incorporate its object request broker (ORB) technology, Visibroker, with Oracle’s software products. Under the terms of the multi-year deal, Oracle said it will use VisiBroker as one of its worldwide Corba technology standards, incorporating the technology into its Oracle8i database, application server and other products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A spokesperson for Inprise said the announcement was just the formal acknowledgment of a licensing partnership that began some time ago. Oracle has already integrated VisiBroker into some of its products, but there was some talk that it would try and develop its own equivalent technology, he said. What this deal is saying is that Oracle has decided to use our request broker for just about everything, and we’re going to get paid for it. Back in June 1997, Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman and chief executive officer, said that the company was working on its own ORB that would, over time, replace VisiBroker. But yesterday’s agreement seems to have put that development on hold – at least for the time being.
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