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Buried in the hoopla of last week's Microsoft Corp.'s Object Linking and Embedding extension announcement lurk fundamental changes to the role PCs play in the flow of data across the enterprise. These changes center on OLE DB, Microsoft's database-oriented extensions to OLE.
It will be another three or four years before these changes, built around Microsoft's OLE DB, will be widely implemented in enterprise networks. According to industry analysts, it will take at least that long for volume development and deployment of such applications.
The OLE DB specification itself, however, is expected to be available at the end of this year, according to Microsoft. Corporate application development around OLE DB formally will begin when the Cairo operating environment is released at the end of 1996, but informal development is expected to begin with the beta release of Cairo, which is scheduled for February 1996, the company said.
"You'll see things pick up very rapidly after the introduction of Cairo," predicted Robert Bismuth, director of corporate standards at Digital Equipment Corp.
According to Bismuth, Digital's porting of its Object Broker-which is based on the industry-standard Common Object Request Broker Architecture and provides links to OLE-to 15 platforms is a fairly mechanical recompile, so that the multiplatform Object Broker version 2.5 will be ready for deployment whenever Microsoft puts the finishing touches on Cairo.
Bismuth...