Visigenic Software Inc opened for business in Europe last week with founder and chairman Roger Sippl describing his company’s collection of database access and object messaging technologies as an open architecture version of Forte, after Forte Software Inc’s three- ier application development architecture. Like other object request broker vendors now supplying technology to large- scale application development projects, Sippl says customers want the scalability object brokers can offer without the proprietary fourth generation programming language and forms model that Forte and others enforce. Visigenic, says Sippl, provides database transparency though its ODBC Open Database Connectivity products, and object messaging through its VisiBroker request broker, which leaves users to choose their own programming languages and forms package. Netscape Communications Corp, an investor in Visigenic (CI No 2,929), is putting a run time version of Visibroker in with a potential 20 million Netscape Communicator clients for accessing Object Management Group-compliant Corba objects from their Web browsers, and Sippl believes that gives Visigenic an opportunity to sell object monitoring tools to Webmasters. He also expects to offer a set of tools for redeploying Corba applications on to the Web, or beyond the intranet, as well as a set of Corba services which developers can plug-in to their applications, presumably to provide security, transaction processing and other connectivity options. The first should be out by the next quarter.
Bridge to ActiveX
Visigenic’s VisiBroker for ActiveX Bridge currently provides one- way access to Corba or Microsoft Corp ActiveX stored objects on Corba or Distributed Common Object Model servers. These can be accessed from C++ or Visual Basic Windows client applications over the Internet. Bi-directional links are due in February. While not out to knock Visigenic’s product – object request broker vendors are keen to grow the Corba market in all directions – Dublin-based rival Iona Technologies Ltd says it’s been delivering this functionality in its Orbix request broker since the summer. Microsoft’s DCOM Distributed Common Object Model software is only available in a beta form in NT shipments, and Iona expects the specification to change before production shipments begin – which is why it and other vendors are not fully supporting the protocols at the low-level. Visigenic, Iona and others will be submitting DCOM-to-Corba mapping technologies to Part B of the Object Management Group’s Corba-to-COM specification program. Visigenic responds to Iona’s claims by trumpeting what it believes are its firsts – to Java, to a Java request broker on the server, and to the IIOP Internet Inter-ORB Protocol. Rather than wait for Microsoft’s adoption of IIOP, Sippl believes a class of Universal object request brokers will emerge to provide multi-platform messaging while hiding the underlying object model, like the multiple database connections ODBC has enabled. Visigenic has opened an office in Paris, and will open others in the UK and Germany shortly. Along with Netscape, Platinum Technology Inc and Cisco Systems Inc paid $8m between them for a total stake of less than 10% in Visigenic last June. Sippl said Platinum is eyeing Visibroker technology for use in its systems administration software tools, having put the ODBC drivers in virtually all its software already. Cisco’s take-up of Visigenic technology seems dependent on the success of the Corba Internet Inter-ORB Protocol. If it takes off, then Cisco would be interested in anything that’s necessary to handle the network traffic, such as VisiBroker. Visigenic went public in August, and is not expected to reach profitability until the third, December, quarter of 1998, according to First Call estimates.
