The benefit of doing business over the Internet directly with customers, vendors and partners is a fundamental business driver that is causing a profound change in how organizations are approaching issues of enterprise integration and application architecture. Today, traditional client/server systems are evolving to multi-tier architectures that are increasingly integrated with enterprise systems. The combination of standards-based component software and rapidly evolving Internet technologies is providing a new platform for distributed applications. Bob Muglia will discuss these trends and describe how Microsoft is evolving its platforms, tools, and technologies to help customers gain business advantage and extend existing enterprise investments.

CORBA and IIOP are leading the way in providing a "lingua franca" for component integration across diverse programming languages, operating systems and networks. This session will discuss the fundamentals of the CORBA architecture along with its support for higher level services such as transactions, security and system management. The session will also look at the state of practise in relation to CORBA, i.e. "who is really doing what with CORBA!"

Distributed Objects for Industrial Automation and Process Control

Within the industrial control sector, elements of continuous, discrete, batch, motion, CNC etc. must increasingly work together and with enterprise IS. In response, ObjectAutomation's strategy is to create a "universal controller" that enables users to focus on the problem rather than the technology. Because no one solution provider can solve every problem, the controller, rather than being a single product, should be a framework for accepting pieces created by experts in specific problem domains. The company is therefore developing a distributed object framework that will simplify integration of objects provided by multiple solution providers. This will leverage commonly available tools and be based on an accepted, and appropriate, object model.

The presentation will describe the reasons why ObjectAutomation (OA) selected Windows NT and DCOM. For one, DCOM supplies far fewer services than CORBA specifies, and some of these basic services are not just left missing, but have no future-oriented specifications. In this way DCOM offers far more flexibility to add application specific services that are basically optimized versions of the more common distributed object services.

It will also look to the future, how this architecture will take advantage of the control industry’s skill-base and how object technology will become prevalent within embedded systems for intelligent devices. Systems are becoming too complex to manage in a rigid, monolithic environment and distributed objects offer some of the answers. They also provide ways to better optimize resources, performance and availability.

An Architecture for IT Diversity

The industry innovates faster than business is willing or able to exploit its innovation. This leads to what prophets of the new like to call a 'legacy problem' - a poor description of the diverse mix of technology and architectures that is actually created by the pace of change. In many cases this 'legacy' technology is the result of strategic investment which is (a) fundamental to the business, and (b) architecturally difficult to integrate with new technologies designed for a more homogeneous world.

The companies leading the internet revolution would like business to start with a clean sheet and adopt their architecture and technology across the board. It is left to vertical integrators and niche developers to provide solutions that integrate diverse architectures, but the economics of these niche markets leads to specific solutions for specific problems which themselves compound the diversity they aim to bridge.

The IT landscape we have inherited lacks an overall bridging architecture that can accommodate and integrate the rich diversity of clients, servers, applications and data that businesses use today and will continue to need in the future. Existing middleware provides piecemeal solutions. Business needs an architecture.

The desktop interface for today's enterprise is based on technology that is inherently tied to the underlying operating system and thus to specific hardware platforms. What MIS and support organizations have asked for is a platform neutral, distributed desktop that provides access to remote applications and data regardless of the user's location and hardware device. It is important also to provide a transition path from today's desktop solutions to this network-centric environment that requires minimal training while maximizing existing hardware and software resources and at the same time allows the purchase of Network Computers and other internet appliances that are becoming available that help reduce the total cost of ownership.