Digital and Hewlett-Packard to Support Microsoft’s COM on UNIX Platforms

ORLANDO, Fla., May 5, 1997 — Today at Microsoft® TechEd, Microsoft Corp, Digital Equipment Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. announced plans to provide Microsoft’s component object model (COM) on Digital and Hewlett-Packard operating systems within the year. This announcement adds to the growing cross-platform support for COM on UNIX and other industry operating system platforms.

Robert Bismuth, vice president of strategic alliances at Digital, said, “Enterprise customers are striving to achieve enterprise connectivity across multivendor environments. COM technology from Microsoft enables seamless integration at each level of client/server solutions and enterprise applications. As an important part of the Digital-Microsoft Alliance for Enterprise Computing, Digital plans to provide COM capabilities during this calendar year for Digital Alpha platforms, Open VMS, Digital UNIX and Windows NT® . Digital has been an active supporter of COM since 1993 and will continue to work closely with Microsoft to deliver these important capabilities for our customers.”

“Interoperability between Microsoft Windows® platforms and HP-UX is important to enterprise customers,” said Ira Goldstein, general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s Internet technology group. “We believe that the addition of a high-quality implementation of COM onto HP-UX provides an important foundation for this interoperability. For example, having COM on HP-UX will enable the cross-platform deployment of DirectX
™
, providing a consistent multimedia environment across Windows and HP-UX technical workstations. We expect to have COM available on HP-UX within the year. HP and Microsoft are working together in many areas to satisfy the cross-platform needs of our enterprise customers.”

“The decision by major system vendors to provide COM technology to their customers highlights the growing cross-platform support for the component object model,” said Bob Muglia, vice president, server applications division at Microsoft. “These efforts by Digital and Hewlett-Packard will make it easier for developers to integrate COM in the enterprise, across multiple platforms. This will provide tremendous customer benefits in terms of interoperability in heterogeneous environments. We look forward to working with Digital, Hewlett-Packard and other major system vendors integrating COM within the enterprise in response to customer needs.”

COM Enables Developers to Build Richer, Cross-Platform Applications

COM provides the ability to build, use, extend and reuse distributed software components in a language-independent way. Using COM, components can securely interoperate in the same fashion whether they are on the same machine or on networked machines across a LAN, WAN or the Internet. COM is widely supported by application and tools developers and provides the most widely used component object model in the industry today.

Developers using COM can take advantage of the largest existing base of tools from Microsoft and third parties, as well as the largest component marketplace. COM is also an integral part of the Windows operating system, and there are a growing number of COM implementations for UNIX systems such as Solaris as well as other systems, such as MVS. More information on COM can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/oledev/

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