Simulation software outfit OriginalSim Inc is redefining its product strategy by migrating the OSim collaborative design and development environment on to Windows NT, leaving Unix to function as the high-performance, run-time deployment platform. Although OriginalSim sells primarily to US defense contractors and aerospace industries, which by and large specify secure Unix and OMG Corba for distributed object communication, it expects NT to become widely used for shared development purposes. However NT systems are nowhere near ready to handle the compute-intensive rendering of graphical simulations, the company says. Following these markets it eschews Microsoft’s DCOM component model in favor of Corba for delivering OSim reusable frameworks and components now demanded by defense industry concerns which, faced with shrinking project budgets, have cottoned on to the economic advantages of object-oriented techniques. OriginalSim’s says its key intellectual property is its ability to integrate multiple extensible environments, frameworks, distributed object communication and execution environments. All of its work adheres to HLA High Level Architecture policies for simulation now mandated by the US Defense Department and European and Asian defense agencies for software delivered from 2000 and beyond. HLA defines a process, rules and various interfaces for simulation as well as some non-mandatory data standards. The idea is to enable defense contractors to deploy multi-vendor simulation products and technologies that can interoperate. It specifies use of a Corba-like run-time interface that’s being submitted to the Object Management Group as a simulation-specific extension to real-time Corba specifications. OSim 4.0 is claimed to generate 70% of an application’s C++ or Java code, compared with legacy simulation development environments that require most of an application to be hand-coded. This week the company will ship a version of OSim which can automatically convert a an object component model created using Rational Rose 98 tools into an OSim simulation class library. The 17-person Montreal, Canada-based spin-out from ObjectForm is capitalized at around $5m following a 1996 round of funding. It says it’s moving from an R&D mentality to a sales and marketing orientation this year. It expects to record a profit on sales of around $1m sales this year. A freeware-style version of OSim costs $5,000. The OSim Framework, its main product, costs $50,000 while an enterprise set-up costs from $1m. OriginalSim does most of its business on Silicon Graphics Inc workstations running Irix but also sells OSim on Sun Microsystems Inc systems. The NT work is due in the summer. It says it will follow Irix to Intel Corp’s IA-64 architecture and says the new graphics architectures such as Fahrenheit being developed by SGI in conjunction with Microsoft and Hewlett- Packard Co are designed primarily to render graphics faster, not offer new functionality. The next big thing in simulation is the adoption of distributed, automated development processes and automatic integration of discrete components.
