The Open Group Announces the Integration of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol for DCE
Digital Equipment, HP and IBM the first to integrate new technologyCAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (December 10, 1997) - THE OPEN GROUP, a vendor-neutral, international consortium of more than 200 members with combined IT budgets in excess of $55 billion annually, today announced support of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol for its Distributed Computing Environment components. LDAP will allow DCE users to choose from a number of commercial directory services and enable their enterprise computing infrastructures to extend to the Internet.
LDAP, a standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, is quickly becoming the universal language for directories used in both Internet and Intranet applications. The addition of LDAP support to DCE enhances interoperability for end users, and reduces administrative support concerns and the duplication of resources that accompanies server administration.
"The LDAP extensions to DCE support the continued evolution of DCE as the premier provider of middleware services, focusing on areas of the Internet, the Web, and secure client-server technologies," said Dave Lounsbury, vice president at The Open Group. "The increased flexibility is a boon to users and administrators because it allows customers a choice of directory configurations, a greater selection of products to fill the directory service need, and an opportunity to consolidate the administration of directory information."
"This announcement demonstrates The Open Group's commitment to providing customers with DCE-based solutions that allow them to take advantage of the Internet," said Phyllis Byrne, IBM vice president
for Distributed Systems Services. "IBM's goal is to help customers of our DSSeries DCE-based products in protecting their existing infrastructure investments while evolving to an e-business model that is cost
efficient, flexible, and heterogeneous, and LDAP support for DCE helps us do that."
The DCE Global Directory Agent (GDA) currently provides DCE site naming through either X.500 or DNS (Domain Naming Service) directory services. As a result of the LDAP project, the GDA can also use LDAP as an alternative mechanism for accessing a global directory service. This integration of LDAP support enables DCE to set up multi-site configurations through the use of widely available, low-cost LDAP servers without incurring the cost of setting up the X.500 or DNS global name service. As the web adopts this naming scheme for more and more data, the ability to access information via LDAP will prove to be increasingly beneficial.
"LDAP is becoming an important standard for our customers, and we're pleased to be part of The Open Group's first collaborative effort toward ensuring this standard can be used to enhance DCE middleware," said Tim Yeaton, vice president, UNIX Business Segment, Digital Equipment Corporation. "Customers will benefit from the choice of directory services and the easier administration that the integration of DCE with LDAP offers, and Digital will begin to roll out LDAP NSI and LDAP GDA in its DCE products over the next several months," Yeaton added.
"DCE support for LDAP addresses a critical interoperability and support area for both DCE and LDAP deployments," commented Ted Hanss, IT manager at the University of Michigan. "I am happy to see The Open Group leading this collaborative effort to further enhance interoperability for DCE users and to continue progressing open system standards. DCE users can now take advantage of the market adoption of LDAP as a key internet-based directory service. The payoffs are in maintaining single server environments and in developing to widely supported APIs."
In another area of integration, adding LDAP support allows DCE to use naming services that are accessible via the LDAP Application Programming Interface (API). The DCE's Name Service Independent (NSI) interface will call the LDAP API to enable the use of LDAP operations along with, or instead of, those used by the existing DCE Cell Directory Service. This will allow all DCE applications to transparently access the name service that best fits the particular customer environment. As a result, administrators can use a single service for storing both LDAP and DCE information within the enterprise.
"The LDAP Name Service Independent interface provides a way for customers to extend their enterprise to the Internet," said David Scott, director of software marketing, Internet & Applications Systems Division for HP. "HP's contribution to the development of this interface reflects our ongoing commitment to offering a flexible foundation for our customers' next-generation enterprise applications."
The DCE LDAP project provides portable implementations of both the GDA and NSI components. DCE support for LDAP will be available by the end of this year. For more information, contact The Open Group at 617-621-7300. Participants in this collaborative effort include Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM.
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About DCE
DCE is a rich set of software technologies available from The Open Group. The technology enables the development of distributed applications across heterogeneous systems. Those applications, in turn, allow companies to take advantage of the far-reaching benefits of open, distributed computing. Today countless users worldwide rely on DCE to support sophisticated distributed applications in a wide variety of industries -- automotive, financial services, petrochemicals, telecommunications, insurance, pharmaceuticals, engineering, manufacturing, retail/wholesale, transportation, utilities, as well as government and academia.
About LDAP
LDAP, a de facto standard from the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), is quickly becoming the universal language for directories used in both Internet and Intranet applications.