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                                                        The Florida SunFlash

        SunSoft Unveils Industry's First General Purpose
               Transport-Independent RPC Toolkit

SunFLASH Vol 39 #5					          March 1992 
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     Novell, Borland, Lotus, AST Research Endorse Technology


MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif-- March 4, 1992 -- Expanding its leadership in
distributed computing, SunSoft today announced the industry's first
general purpose Transport-Independent Remote Procedure Call (TI-RPC)
Toolkit for client-server application development. TI-RPC combined with
code generation technology from NetWise, Inc. is a part of the ONC
distributed computing services provided in the SunSoft Solaris
solution.  Called the ONC RPC Application Toolkit, this advanced
development platform enables software developers to create a single
version of a client-server application that runs unmodified across a
range of operating systems, hardware platforms and networks.  The
toolkit and several implementations of TI-RPC were tested today at the
Connectathon '92 interoperability event in San Jose, Calif.

Leading hardware and software vendors including Novell Inc., the
leading provider of network server operating systems solutions, Borland
International, a leading developer of object oriented software and
programming languages, Lotus Development Corp., the developer of the
industry-leading Lotus 1-2-3 productivity package, and AST Research, a
leading manufacturer of personal computers in the 80386/486 market
endorsed SunSoft's ONC RPC Application Toolkit. In addition, Burlington
Coat and VXM announced support for the new product. The toolkit is part
of a comprehensive networking strategy to be announced by SunSoft in
the next few months.

"Developing for low-level network transport protocols has been a
bottleneck in thecreation of distributed applications," said Helen
Bradley, director of distributed computing at SunSoft. "With the ONC
RPC Application Toolkit, we're providing software developers with the
necessary technologies to deliver applications, transparent of network
protocols, to the market today."

"We've been involved in UNIX for some time and have found
Transport-Independent RPC technology to be important to our UNIX and
TCP/IP customers," said Bob Davis, director of connectivity product
marketing at Novell. "Novell is driven to support our customer's needs
in heterogeneous environments, and we fully support SunSoft's efforts
to provide software developers with all the technology needed to make
distributed computing a reality."


 SunSoft's ONC RPC Application Toolkit unlocks the potential for
developers to create applications that can access and utilize
information over multiple networks such as TCP/IP, OSI, NetWare's
IPX/SPX and others. The toolkit is based on the industry standard ONC
RPC networking services which has an installed base of more than 1.8
million seats (International Data Corp., December 1990). This installed
base opens up a large market for the ONC RPC Application Toolkit. To
date more than 300 companies have licensed or implemented ONC
technology including IBM, Apple, DEC, HP, SCO and Novell. ONC provides
interoperability across all major operating systems including DOS,
Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, UNIX, VM, MVS and VMS.

The toolkit consists of a source code generator based upon the RPC Tool
technology from NetWise, and the TI-RPC procedure technology developed
by Sun Microsystems, Inc. and AT&T. A key element of the toolkit, the
TI-RPC mechanism shields the developer from the complexities of
underlying network and communication transport protocols and allows
client-server applications to interoperate across heterogeneous
networks.


SunSoft press contacts:

Laura Ramsey
SunSoft, Inc.
415-336-0739

Claudia Carasso
Hi-Tech Public Relations
415-864-5600 

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