The Open Group offers $1 million sponsorship

Editorial Contacts:

Scott VanSickle
Supriya Venkat
McGrath/Power Public Relations
(408) 727-0351
scottv @mcgpr.com
supriyav@mcgpr.com

Chris Vander Rhodes
Object Management Group
+1-508-820 4300
chrisvr@omg.org

THE OPEN GROUP OFFERS $1 MILLION SPONSORSHIP TO OPEN SOURCE ORB VENDORS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE OPEN BRAND FOR CORBA^® PROGRAM TO PROMOTE OPEN SOURCE INTEROPERABILITY

MICO Version 2.2.7 Hosted by ThinkOne and omniORB2 Developed by AT&T Laboratories Cambridge First Open Source Releases to Benefit from Testing, Certification and Branding Fee Waivers

MENLO PARK, Calif. (June 7, 1998) – The Open Group, a trusted forum dedicated to enterprise integration, today announced it will offer $1 million in sponsored CORBA^® (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) access to test suites and the Open Brand for CORBA to select Open Source middleware vendors. The Open Group is offering compliance testing, certification and branding services – amounting to $1 million free of charge – to promote the interoperability of Open Source Object Request Brokers (ORBs). The Open Group views the sponsorship as a key step to boosting confidence in the purchase and use of Open Source freeware within the IT/IS community.

"The Open Group is committed to enabling integration across the enterprise through efforts like the CORBA branding program. We also recognize the value represented by the Open Source community in developing robust code through the collective input of software engineers working together," said Allen Brown, COO and acting president of The Open Group. "The Open Group is pleased to recognize the role of quality Open Source software by offering compliance certification at no charge. Though the sponsorship program, The Open Group is providing customers with a guarantee that approved Open Source software is interoperable with CORBA branded solutions regardless of the vendor."

MICO 2.2.7, hosted by ThinkOne, a joint venture of France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) and Deutsche Telekom (NYSE: DT), has currently achieved compliance with the CORBA 2.1 standard. Initially released as a project by Arno Puder, a software engineer at ThinkOne in Brisbane, Calif., MICO is the collaborative result of over 1000 independent programmers working together to modify and improve the initial source code. Major companies including Deutsche Telekom are currently using MICO ORBs to integrate commercial applications within the corporate IT infrastructure. MICO is available for downloading free of charge at http://www.mico.org.

"As Open Source developers, it is encouraging to receive validation for our efforts from The Open Group," said Puder. "By achieving the CORBA 2.1 brand, MICO demonstrates the strengths of the Open Source movement in producing quality solutions that meet or exceed current standards, proving that Open Source software provides significant value to any corporate enterprise."

The omniORB2, an ORB developed at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge has acquired compliance with the CORBA 2.1 standard. The research group’s omniORB2 is publicly available on the World Wide Web at http://www.uk.research.att.com.

"We believe that CORBA has an extremely important part to play in the future of communications and the Internet," said Dr. Sai Lai Lo at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge. "Compliance to standards is vital for interoperability between ORB implementations, and branding is a practical way to achieve this. Simplicity, efficiency, and robustness are the characteristics of our ORB, and earning the CORBA brand has shown that these can be achieved without compromising standards compliance."

Qualifying Open Source vendors will be approved by The Open Group on a case-by-case basis, to ensure the vendor offers legitimate technical support, can produce CORBA-compliant objects, and can maintain compliance to the standard in the future. Additional qualifications will include the vendor’s position within the Open Source community and its track record for producing quality code.

WHAT IS CORBA?

The Object Management Group (OMG™) developed the CORBA architecture as an open, vendor-neutral specification that allows disparate systems and software applications to work together smoothly. Simply stated, CORBA allows applications to communicate with one another without regard to software or hardware platform, or location on any network (or the Internet). A result of the OMG’s technology adoption process, which includes input from the OMG’s approximately 800 member organizations, CORBA is a complete, distributed object computing framework that extends applications across networks, languages, component boundaries and operating systems. Enterprise applications based on CORBA are scalable to thousands of clients and servers across all computing platforms. It is used in dozens of industries from banking to manufacturing, retail to utilities, transportation to healthcare in such organizations as Wells Fargo Bank, Boeing, The Gap, Federal Express, CNN Interactive and the UK department of Immigration Control.

By testing and branding CORBA-based ORBs, The Open Group provides an interoperability guarantee, ensuring that vendors’ implementations are in compliance with the CORBA specification and will interoperate with the implementations of all other compliant ORBs.

ABOUT THE OPEN GROUP

The Open Group is committed to delivering greater business efficiency by bringing together buyers and suppliers of information systems to lower the time, cost and risk associated with integrating new technology across the enterprise.

The Open Group consortium ensures that multi-vendor information technology matches the demands and needs of customers. This is achieved through the development and deployment of frameworks, polices, best practices and standards in pursuit of the group's IT DialTone™ vision - the concept of making all technology as open and accessible as using a telephone.

By leveraging the expertise of its sponsors – Compaq (NSYE: CPQ), Fujitsu, HP (NYSE: HWP), Hitachi (TSE:6501), IBM (NYSE: IBM), NCR (NYSE: NCR), Siemens, Sun (NASDAQ: SUNW) - and other members comprising leading software companies, Fortune 500 users and government departments, The Open Group is well on its way to achieving the DialTone vision. Embracing the maxim: "we can do so much more together than alone", The Open Group is helping its members to stay ahead in the race to use technology to gain competitive advantage.

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Note to editors: IT DialTone and The Open Group are trademarks of The Open Group in the US and other countries.

CORBA^® is a registered trademark of the Object Management Group. OMG™, Object Management Group™, ORB™, Object Request Broker™, IIOP™, OMG Interface Definition Language (IDL) ™, and UML™ are trademarks of the Object Management Group. All other products or company names mentioned are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners.