Taiwan’s government-run research arm, the Institute for Information Industry has licensed SoftBench, Hewlett-Packard Co’s software engineering integration framework. The agreement gives the highly-regarded SoftBench its first toehold in the Far East. The Information Institute made the selection in preference to Sun Microsystems Inc’s ToolTalk and Digital Equipment Corp’s Fuse. It will use the Framework and SoftBench Encapsulator to build an integrated environment for software engineering tools to be developed in-house and by local independent software vendors. The Information Institute also expects to be a contributing member of CASE Communique, the effort among suppliers and end users to establish standard specifications for inter-tool communication in framework environments. The SoftBench product has already been licensed by IBM Corp, Informix Software Inc, Control Data Systems Inc, Objectivity Inc and Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG.
