Open Hypermedia Systems Working Group

DCOM

DCOM Availability

This page contains pointers to those companies that produce DCOM tools, and provides a brief summary of their products and prices. This is list is not meant to be complete. If you know of additional vendors, not listed here, please send me the information. I've also provided some figures representing the current penetration of COM technologies into the software market.

DCOM Vendors

Micosoft - DCOM is, of course, a Microsoft vision. It is available for Win95 and WinNT. There are no plans for support under Win3.x. Windows NT comes supplied with the necessary COM libraries for immediate use. Windows 95 requires a DCOM patch available from Microsoft here, provided for free. Microsoft also provides COM/DCOM API support directly into all of its Visual Developer products (C++, Basic and Java), although most new Win32 developer tools (from all software venders) can use COM and DCOM. These Development tools are available in the DevStudio suite and cost in the region of 800 US dollars. Although academic licensing brings the price down to 190 US dollars. Similar pricing and deals are available on the non-Microsoft Windows development products as well.

Software AG - This is the company that is porting DCOM to a variety of UNIX platforms. Including Sun Solaris, Digital Unix, HP-UX, AIX, Linux and OS/390 (MVS Open Edition). It is even possible to set up component servers under BS2000 and VSE. The release for Sun Solaris 2.5 is available (again at no charge) from this site.

Iona - This company is more usually associated with CORBA, but they also provide a bridge between CORBA and DCOM. Orbix for Windows is the standard ORB for Windows95 and NT. It makes DCOM objects available to CORBA applications and vice versa. The package costs in the region of 2500 US dollars for a developer license and 100 US dollars for a run time license.

DCOM In Use Today

According to Microsofts own figures COM/DCOM is used on 200 million systems worldwide. With applications using COM generating approximately 410 million US dollars this year, with a projected 65 percent compound annual growth rate. It is expected to grow to approximately 3 billion US dollars by 2001 (source: Giga Information Group). Also major system vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co., Digital Equipment Corp. and Siemens Nixdorf Information Systems Inc. have announced plans to ship COM on UNIX and non-UNIX systems within the year.