The chorus of Distributed Computing Environment naysayers swells by the week, but industry-watchers Unigram spoke to believe the supposed lack of deployment of the Environment speaks mostly of the fact that there are few organisations yet capable of exploiting its enterprise functionality. Moreover for those complaining that the Distributed Environment does not fit lower down the scale, well the thing simply is not designed to live there, at least not yet, they say. What is true is that independent software vendors are slow in coming to the environment. Even apparently rising stars in the client-server world one would think would be ripe for the Environment, such as SAP AG, have no plans to accommodate it. SAP says it will enable Distributed Computing-compliant applications to attach themselves to its R/3 financial and accounting software. SAP, which looked at the Environment a long time ago, instead plumped for a lightweight, proprietary remote procedure call, called Remote Function Call, which supports SAP application-related traffic. Swapping in Distributed Computing Environment would require heavy-duty hacking and once you are in Remote Function Call, you are in for the count. As a result, R/3 enjoys none of the Environment’s benefits, having only minimal or non-existent network security, unlike products from rivals such as PeopleSoft Inc, which is now trying on the Distributed Computing boot for size.
