f the server market, which has been dominated since the late 1960s by IBM. IBM'
s venerable MVS OS, together with the transaction support provided by Customer Information Control System (CICS), underlies much of the world's business.
The key components of Active Server include:
- The
Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
, which provides remote access to servers through remote procedure calls (RPCs).
-
Microsoft Message Queue,
which provides remote access to servers via the primary alternative to RPC, known as message passing.
-
Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS),
a key component that lets customers create transaction-oriented applications, much like CICS.
-
Active Server Pages,
supporting the creation of Web-based applications running on the server.
Parts of Active Server, such as DCOM, MTS, and Active Server Pages, were already shipping at the time of the announcement. Microsoft Message Queue will be released this year. MTS, which was code-named Viper, is perhaps
the most important of the Active Server technologies, and its initial price of $2000 is well below what competitors have typically charged for this kind of software. According to the Gartner Group's Roy Schulte, MTS has "a better-than-even chance of becoming the leading infrastructure for new enterprise TP applications by 2001, assuming the role that CICS has played during the past 20 years."
MTS has limitations. In its first release, for example, the product is entirely focused on Windows NT and Microsoft's SQL Server. Microsoft says that it plans to add support later this year for other databases via the Open Group's XA protocol and for a connection to CICS through a technology code-named Cedar. Support for these other transaction-processing protocols will let businesses deploy applications that integrate with Unix and mainframe systems. However, with MTS and Active Server, Microsoft has begun the foundation to allow NT to become the MVS of the client/server era.
Microsoft Goes for the Enterprise
