Chicago financial and accounting house System Software Associates Inc is trumpeting its submission to the Object Management Group’s Business Object Facility Request for Proposals for pre-defined business rules such as customer, order and name, and object services that will enable developers to create interoperable business objects. System Software thinks that with two ex-Object Group board members now sitting on its board, it has a good chance. European director of technology Samit Khosla says System Software is betting its future on use of the Facility as an object-to-object messaging system based around the use of semantic messages. The Facility sits above an Object Request Broker, which in System Software’s case will initially be IBM Corp’s Distributed System Object Model and later Expersoft Corp’s XShell. UK firm JBA Holdings Plc and IBM appear to be creating similar facilities for use with their San Francisco object-oriented application development framework using JBA Guidelines (CI No 2,850), though Khosla believes San Francisco will not embrace the same object-to-object functionality. System Software says its implementation of the Facility will appear in a new 7.0 version of its BPCS software; submissions to the Reques t for Proposals are due by mid-June; successful applicants will be revealed with the specification by October.
