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                                                        The Florida SunFlash
   
  NCR/Object Design And HP/Sun Join Forces At Industry Standards Group

SunFLASH Vol 29 #4					            May 1991 
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      Collaborative Effort Seen As Garnering Wide Industry
           Support for Object Management Specification

DAYTON, Ohio -- May 14, 1991 -- NCR Corporation and Object Design, Inc.,
and Hewlett-Packard Company and Sun Microsystems, Inc. have joined forces
to propose an object management specification to the Object Management
Group (OMG), an international organization of systems vendors and users.

Together, these companies provide a comprehensive response to the OMG's
request for Object Request Broker (ORB) technology.  ORB defines an
advanced method for using and sharing information on networked computers
from different vendors.  Third-party software vendors can use these
methods to lower the cost of writing portable applications that can
interoperate in distributed computing environments.

The combined submission offers a consistent architecture that has broad
support on different hardware platforms, operating systems and networks.
The multivendor collaboration between the companies is consistent with
OMG goals of providing a solution for the ORB which can quickly be
adopted by the industry.

Collaborative Effort Enhances the ORB Proposal

The combined submission will utilize Sun/HP Distributed Object Management
Facilities (OMF).  The Distributed OMF has several advantages, including
a high-level language interface known as the Class Definition Language
(CDL) and a runtime application programming interface that supports the
development of portable applications across multiple distributed
computing technologies, including the Network Computing System (NCS)
from HP and Open Network Computing (ONC) protocols from Sun.

NCR will provide a CDL compiler with an interface to NCR's Remote Method
Invocation (RMI), an advanced technique for object communication.

"The collaborative effort provides significant added-value above and
beyond what was provided by each of the individual submissions," said
Robert J. Frankenberg, HP vice president and general manager of its
Personal Systems Group.  "We believe this alliance will further
strengthen products resulting from this collaboration."

NCR adds proven technology to the submission with its experience and
focus on PC-based platforms and by providing common class libraries, which
are sets of reusable objects used by programmers to quickly develop
applications.

"NCR is contributing technology to advance the commercial application of
object technology," said James J. Walker, general manager for NCR
Cooperative Computing Systems Division.

"Object Design will work with Hewlett-Packard, NCR and Sun to provide one
of the first implementations of the ORB interface to an object database
management system," said Thomas Atwood, founder and chairman of Object
Design, Inc.  "This is proof of the broad applicability of the Sun/HP and
the NCR/Object Design submissions, which were designed to support
multiple object database management systems."

Edward J. Zander, President of Sun Microsystems' new system software
subsidiary said, "NCR and Object Design add valuable open technology to
an already outstanding submission."

Object Design, Inc., headquartered in Burlington, Mass., develops and
markets ObjectStore, a complete object-oriented database management
system including a database engine, professional development tools, and
graphical end-user interface tools.  The company's products are designed
to work in today's distributed, heterogeneous networks.  The company also
offers comprehensive training and consulting services.

ONC is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.  UNIX is a registered 
trademark of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc.  All other products mentioned 
herein are identified by the trademarks as designed by the companies who 
market those products.  Inquiries concerning such trademarks should be 
made to those companies.

For Further Information Contact: Steve Martino

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