IBM Corp’s transaction processing subsidiary Transarc Corp took time to raise its head above the parapet last month, detailing a plan to release a version of its Encina monitor in early 1997 enabling the invoking of messages over Corba-compliant obj ect request brokers including Iona Technologies Ltd Orbix and IBM’s Distributed System Object Model. It still remains to be convinced about the worth of the current crop of object brokers on the market, it says, believing they lack rigid contact bet ween clients and servers and the necessary levels of performance scalability and security. But the work the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based firm is involved in with the Object Management Group’s Object Transaction Service specification has convinced it that the move towards Object Transaction Monitors is inevitable. In the meantime, the backbone of Encina Monitor communications is supplied courtesy of the aging Distributed Computing Environment Remote Procedure Call including dynamic binding and asynchronous communication; old the technology may be, Transarc concedes, but it offers the kind of security and binding that object brokers are still struggling to provide. Other features to be included in the first half of next year are support for Object Group Interface Definition Language, distributed transaction, advanced security, transparent resource replication, load balancing and single-image systems administration. Transarc had revenues of $30m last year and claims it has 500 major customers.
