Redwood City Ð With the imminent release of PDO 2.0 (Portable Distributed Objects), NeXT continues its drive to develop a broad crossplatform presence. Scheduled for shipment in May, the new version will add support for the Solaris and SunOS platforms and include new features prompted by customer feedback. Other platforms should arrive on the PDO scene shortly: Data General is readying a release of PDO that will run on its operating system, and NeXT has indicated that support for AT&T Global Information Systems (formerly NCR) and Digital Equipment Corporation is in the works.
The increased backing for PDO was good news to many vendors. Supporting Sun's platforms in PDO 2.0 "will help many customers in the transition to OpenStep," said Jim Green, director of object products at SunSoft. "Many are interested in working with NeXT and Sun machines in the same configuration, and PDO allows them to run NEXTSTEP on clients and Solaris on servers."
Expanding its support for NeXT's technology, Data General at press time was shooting for a March release of a version of PDO 1.0 that would bring its DG-UX into the NEXTSTEP fold.
"The performance is very good," said Christine Wallis, director of marketing at Data General. "We have a number of customers who are very interested because, as groovy as [NEXTSTEP's] desktop tools are, they frequently need more horsepower." A 2.0 version of PDO for DG-UX should follow quickly now that NeXT has completed its upgraded version, Wallis added.
Negotiations for ports to AT&T Global and Digital Equipment are underway, according to Kate Smith, NeXT's PDO product manager. Finished products would appear approximately six months after an agreement is signed. "We're actively talking to people," Smith said. "We're interested in getting PDO on a lot of platforms."
Smith added that pricing for PDO will remain equivalent across each new platform to which the software is ported.