Reports emerging yesterday suggested that ICL Plc had licensed its DAIS object request broker technology exclusively to San Francisco-based Peerlogic Inc. An announcement is expected today. ICL last month said it would be winding down its efforts to promote DAIS to third parties and concentrate instead on using it as an internal systems integration tool (CI No 3,364). It looks as if Peerlogic, one of the pioneers of asynchronous queuing and messaging technology with its Pipes distributed messaging and management toolset, will take over all future development and licensing activities for the Corba-compliant software. Peerlogic said at the beginning of July that it had set in place a plan for the future following a year in which it almost didn’t survive (CI No 3,443). DAIS was first developed way back in 1991, and has been sold to at least 20,000 end user seats in the US alone. In Europe, it has been used for some major projects, including a 4,000 seat system built by British Aerospace and the UK Home Office’s Suspect Index System for the Immigration Service. ICL’s exit from the market mirrors that of Digital Equipment Corp, which sold its ObjectBroker off to BEA Systems Inc, while Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc have abandoned no fewer than four ORBs between them – Distributed Smalltalk, ORB Plus, NEO and Joe. Peerlogic will move into competition with BEA, Iona Technologies Ltd and Inprise Corp, which acquired the Visigenic ORB last year.
