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The Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) may seem to be taking off, but in fact, its position is very precarious. DCE doesn't have a single, profit-making champion behind it. For DCE to be practical over the long term for corporate development, it will need such a force. Unfortunately, IBM's recent acquisition of Transarc Corp. (NW, Aug. 22, page 12) was a step in just the opposite direction.
For DCE to spread, it must become the basis for a rich, varied market of products and services. The current structure won't create the volumes of platform installations that independent tool vendors need to justify creation of software that makes DCE broadly useful to many organizations.
In the meantime, the alternatives to DCE -- Novell, Inc.'s NetWare 4.0, Sybase, Inc.'s Sybase 10, Oracle Corp.'s Oracle Parallel Server, and related distributed data access and management products, along with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT Advanced Server -- are becoming the basis for volume markets. In doing so, these competitors are sowing the seeds of DCE's demise.
The DCE market today is organized in essentially the same way as the Unix market. Vendors can license the technology and then port it to their operating system platforms. The Open Software Foundation, Inc. (OSF) manages this licensing process and also oversees evolution of the DCE code, specifications, extension and conformance testing. Individual licensees are free to apply the DCE technology to meet their customers' requirements.
DCE licensees have an interest in maintaining compatibility of the basic DCE services. However,...