"Speaking as the representative of the DCE vendor community ..."
James Curtin
President
Dascom, Inc.

DCE can now be said to have a long history in the IT industry, especially from the perspective of the Web and its rapid developments. DCE was conceived as a collaborative effort arising from users’ absolute requirements for dealing with the heterogeneity of the ‘open systems’ world, as well as the need to include the vast stores of data and dollars invested in legacy systems into a single conceptual network-based architecture.

Out of this early drive came vendor commitment and investment for a period sufficient to successfully develop the product through the minimum levels of the original vision. Other technologies started to arise and vie for users’ attention in the enterprise market space, initially public key technology and CORBA, then more recently Java and other internet-related technologies.

It has taken some time to readjust to the turmoil of competitiveness. DCE was supposed to have been a pre-ordained standard. But, adjust it has. Today, DCE is more relevant and more vibrant than any time in the past three years. This is due to greater and more mature user involvement, newer players investing in this solution space, and the fact that DCE has found the ‘center’ – its role amongst the many different technologies – where no other technology has yet been able to challenge it.

Standards-based competition, the obvious synergies with other technologies, and the increasingly sophisticated needs of the network computing era, have lead us to the point where DCE is being invested in by both vendors, and users, at a rate unprecedented in the ‘long’ life of DCE. Speaking as the representative of the DCE vendor community, we see continued individual and collaborative investment in DCE and DCE-related solutions as a sound technical as well as economic decision.