SUNFLASH ! ---------- Sunflash is an electronic mail news service from Sun Microsystems, Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Please address comments to John McLaughlin (sun!sunvice!johnj or johnmclaughlin@sun.COM). (305) 776-7770. Sunflash is targeted at Sun customers and users, not Sun employees as much of the information posted to sunflash is already available to Sun employees. If you have any information that you think would be of value to Sun users and customers, please email it to sun!sunvice!johnj. -johnj ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Industry Leaders Endorse Common Platform For Distributed Computing DALLAS, Sept. 12, 1989 -- More than a score of leading computer manufacturers, software firms and networking vendors today announced support for a new distributed computing platform. The platform, based on technology announced today by Sun Microsystems, Inc.; Netwise, Inc.; Novell, Inc.; and others, will allow software developers to write distributed applications that run, without modification, across a wide range of operating systems, hardware architectures and networking products. Today's announcement, designed to expand the distributed computing market and accelerate development of distributed applications, brings together the following vendors: o Ashton-Tate Corporation o AST Research, Inc. o Automated Design Systems, Inc. o Banyan Systems Inc. o Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation o CMC o Computer Sciences Corporation o DAZIX o Informix Software, Inc. o INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation o Lotus Development Corp. o Microrim, Inc. o Netwise, Inc. o Novell, Inc. o Oracle Corporation o Relational Technology Inc. o Sun Microsystems, Inc. o Sybase, Inc. o 3Com Corporation o Unify Corporation o Wang Laboratories "This pooling of technologies reflects Sun's commitment to delivering leading-edge distributed computing tools that leverage existing technologies and standards while migrating users to emerging industry standards," said Larry Garlick, Sun vice president of distributed systems. "Transport-independent RPC represents the continuing evolution of Sun's Open Network Computing technology. We assure our 260 ONC licensees that their existing RPC/XDR applications will interoperate with and smoothly upgrade to the new technology." Mark Hatch, Netwise vice president of marketing, said, "There's no longer a reason to delay the development of client-server applications. This platform will allow today's applications to run across many network transports and to migrate smoothly to International Standards Organization protocols." "Novell is committed to the development and adoption of technologies which spur the growth of the network computing industry," said Nancy Woodward, Novell vice president. "This new platform for distributed applications will allow a single version of software to operate transparently on different kinds of networks, making the power of network computing more accessible by simplifying connectivity issues for both network users and application developers." "We support this effort by Sun, Netwise and Novell to consolidate remote procedure call protocols," said Frank Moss, vice president of Lotus Development Corporation's networked Applications Systems Division. "This effort will make it easier for Lotus and other applications developers to provide truly distributed applications that will run without modification in a network of PCs, UNIX workstations, minicomputers and other large systems." "This announcement underscores the importance of network transparency in developing applications for the heterogeneous, multiprotocol networks of the 1990s," said Smokey Wallace, vice president and general manager of Oracle's Network Products Division. "This common platform will liberate customers from worrying about network details and allow them to concentrate on the business issues of building portable, distributed applications." "3Com is committed to providing client-server systems based on industry-standard operating systems, such as DOS, OS/2, Lan Manager, and communication protocols such as DLC, XNS, TCP, OSI and AFP," said Eric Benhamou, vice president and general manager, Distributed Systems Division, 3Com Corporation. "Incorporating this RPC technology into our 3+Open products will provide greater interoperability with heterogeneous networks of PCs, workstations, minicomputers and mainframes. We will continue to support the current 3+Open APIs, Named Pipes, NetBios and Sockets." According to Dr. James Allchin, Banyan Systems vice president, product development, "Banyan is committed to supporting industry efforts to establish an RPC compiler standard that will facilitate the development of distributed applications that can run without modification on any of a variety of network operating systems." Banyan Systems is a longtime advocate of RPC technology and has been building its VINES(R) products using RPC technology for more than six years. Besides supporting the Netwise RPC compiler and Sun RPC, Banyan will continue to support and enhance its own RPC mechanism, NetRPC. "We believe that, with the backing of the major network vendors, the Netwise/Sun RPC mechanism will do much to promote widespread acceptance of the distributed applications environment among all kinds of network users," he said. "Ashton-Tate is committed to its strategy of client/server computing and interoperability across multiple platforms," said Eric Kim, Ashton-Tate's vice president, data base products. "We consider standards such as this RPC to be very important to our strategy and the industry in general, simplifying the software development process and enabling customers to leverage their software/hardware investments by establishing a better communications link between dissimilar systems. This means that a future user of dBASE IV on UNIX will be able to easily share data across a network with other dBASE users including current DOS-based dBASE users." "CMC is pleased to join Sun, Netwise and Novell in endorsing the RPC/XDR architecture as a standard platform for distributed computing among heterogeneous systems," stated Ashok Dhawan, vice president of product marketing and development at CMC, a Rockwell International company that supplies high-performance networking solutions. "CMC uses RPC/XDR technology today as a key element in our OpenWare family of networking products which provide NFS file sharing between VAX/VMS, MS-DOS and UNIX systems. We are especially excited about bringing this technology to VMS systems. CMC is committed to supporting this and future developments in the RPC/XDR distributed computing technology in the CMC OpenWare product line." "As an early and active supporter of industry standards UNIX, Ethernet and NFS, in addition to distributed network applications, Daisy/Cadnetix (DAZIX) wholeheartedly endorses this most recent drive from Sun, Netwise and Novell to make distributed applications technology more readily available to the marketplace. We look forward to the next year's shipment of the Netwise RPC TOOL, and we view this as an important step toward distributed processing in a truly heterogeneous networking environment, encompassing multiple platforms, operating systems and network protocols," said DAZIX Systems Marketing Manager Bill Everard. Corporations with complex MIS requirements also welcomed today's development. "This common platform will allow Burlington Coat to push forward with more distributed applications. I'm excited by the prospect of my applications gaining access to more network, hardware and operating system platforms," said Michael Prince, MIS director for Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse Corporation, a discount apparel chain with 146 retail stores nationwide. "Burlington already uses Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and distributed computing technology throughout its operations and has made a significant investment in the Sun ONC/NFS distributed computing model in everything from DOS-based store cash registers to multivendor networks in our distribution and warehouse facilities." As an early user of distributed computing technology, Burlington Coat recognizes the importance of an industry-standard RPC with broad industry acceptance. "We were faced with some very tough decisions on how to proceed in an environment that already includes ONC/NFS and Novell networks, Sun workstations and Sequent minicomputers. This announcement spells r-e-l-i-e-f for us," said Prince. "Microrim is intrigued with the possibilities that the Sun, Netwise and Novell distributed computing platform presents because Microrim will supply the first complete DBMS solution for enterprise-wide data sharing," said Dennis Comfort, Microrim vice president of development. "Microrim looks forward to exploring the technology further with them." According to Bob Epstein, executive vice president at Sybase, Inc., a leading vendor of relational databases for on-line applications, the new network API helps address an important issue for database users and vendors. "Customers want open access from their applications to diverse database servers. A standard network API allows us to develop database communication services that work transparently across all major networks." "Relational Technology Inc., makers of the INGRES family of inherently distributed data management products, fully supports efforts to standardize an RPC interface for distributed applications development. INGRES developers can write 'open' distributed database applications by using Sun's transport-independent RPC. These applications can access information through RPC calls in non-database data sources like mail servers. At the same time, by using Relational's OpenSQL, these applications maintain full transparent access to data in multiple vendors' databases located across a network of heterogeneous machines. The new platform provides to the distributed computing world what Relational Technology's OpenSQL provides to the distributed database world: machine, data and network-independent information access and resource utlization," said Christopher Greendale, Relational Techology vice president of marketing. "As a leading licensor of NFS, TCP/IP and OSI transport technologies to System V-based OEMs, we see this announcement as providing key missing pieces that developers need to access the power of network computing," said Ezra Goldman, vice president of software technologies for INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. "INTERACTIVE's network technology products, accepted by more than 75 licensees, will support and interoperate with the results of this cooperative effort." Karan Eriksson, vice president of marketing for Unify Corporation, said, "We enthusiastically endorse a standard platform for distributed computing. Unify is offering distributed database technologies that utilize the Netwise RPC tool. In addition, ACCELL/SQL, our 4GL-based application development tool set, resides on multiple databases and offers many user interface choices. Since ACCELL/SQL is architected to allow applications to eventually utilize data from heterogeneous databases on a network, we can realize immediate benefits from the common platform from Sun, Netwise and Novell." "It's a great day for industry standards," said Stan Levine, vice president of engineering for Automated Design Systems, Inc., an Atlanta-based systems integrator. "We're genuinely excited about this platform and fully intend to make use of it with our corporate customers who need a general purpose tool to get information from one system to any other system." Automated Design already has implemented the Netwise RPC technology for a leading oil-industry firm to manage real-time process variables with a graphical interface. "The proliferation of network protocols in the corporate computing environment presents a huge development challenge for applications software developers like Informix," said Sherri Osaka, connectivity product marketing manager for Informix. "We applaud the efforts of Sun, Netwise and Novell in creating a standard interface that will enable us to more quickly and efficiently supplement our existing connectivity solutions in response to customer demand." "Wang Laboratories has found the Netwise compiler to be an excellent tool for the development of open network client/server applications. The growing industry support for this technology will help accelerate the availability of client-server application solutions," said John Kowalonek, manager of server/desktop integration at Wang. "The concept of supporting a single remote procedure call implementation across a variety of networking environments, operating systems and transport protocols is very attractive to our customer base," said Michael Krieger, senior manager, advanced products, AST Research, Inc. "Since AST platforms are used in UNIX, NetWare and Sun NFS environments, we see the requirement for API standards for distributed applications growing rapidly for our customers, and applaud Netwise's efforts in this area." "CSC regards standards for distributed networking as a critical industry problem," said Dr. Walter Culver, corporate vice president, System Integration Division of CSC, the largest independent system integration company worldwide. "We applaud the formation of this standards announcement and we're actively evaluating this product for use in our system integration laboratories and business units." ### Press Contact: Dennis Freeman (415) 336-6117