The OSF DCE User & Developer Conference, held Apr. 16-18 in San Jose, CA, offered a wide-ranging, comprehensive look at the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) and its applications across the enterprise. The well-attended conference offered visitors a variety of useful presentations arranged in four concurrent tracks: DCE Technology, Tools and Products; DCE Deployment/End User Stories; DCE Client/Server & Objects; and DCE Security and the World Wide Web.
Other highlights of the conference included a presentation by Maj. Gen. William H. Campbell on the U.S. Army's use of DCE for its global command and control effort, and a "DCE-enabled" product showcase where attendees could run DCE-based applications on a variety of different platforms. Products were available from several of the industry's principal vendors, including Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett-Packard and SunSoft.
At the show, UniNews spoke with Joseph Maloney, director of technology marketing for OSF. He filled us in on the ongoing work of OSF and The Open Group that focuses on the advancement of DCE technology and implementations. He told us that work is concentrating in three major areas of technology: the World Wide Web, objects and client/server. OSF has carried out significant work in each of these areas, which Maloney says has had "a major effect on the direction of DCE."
Maloney stressed that the presentations at this year's conference show significant growth in the number of companies that are actually in production with DCE-related products. "For the first time," he said, "a large number of companies and organizations are talking about full production use of DCE." Maloney specifically cited MCI, which currently has 8,500 DCE users throughout its organization; IBM, which is integrating DCE's time, directory and security services into its CORBA model; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, which has just made a major investment in DCE; and the U.S. Army, which is planning procurements of DCE technology that will amount to some $2 billion over the next few years.
"At previous shows, participants were talking about their early work with DCE: testing, prototyping and so on," Maloney said. "A critical mass appears to finally have been reached in the productization of DCE. This is also reflected in what the industry consultants and analysts are saying." He cited a recent industry market research study from Input of Mountain View, CA, that estimates a 100 percent compound annual growth rate for sales of DCE-related products and services. The study valued the DCE market at $50 million at the end of 1994, and it states that it will grow to $1.65 billion by 1999. Maloney said that OSF "considers these figures to be conservative," particularly in light of the level of government DCE-related procurement.
According to Maloney, "DCE technology is finding adoption in so many application areas that its explosive growth can no longer be ignored. DCE is gaining this tremendous acceptance because it provides something vitally important to open systems: real interoperability. After all the hype and argument," he said, "there are only two things that users of open systems really want: portable interfaces across platforms and interoperability. DCE is positioned to deliver in both those areas."