P&S'ing for Dollars

We appreciate BYTE's recognition of the growth of publish and subscribe technology ("Publish or Perish," by Richard Hackathorn, September). However, we would like to clarify several points made in the article.

The statement that "no examples of monetary exchange with P&S have occurred" (page 66) dismisses the origin of publish/subscribe technology on Wall Street, where this model provides the infrastructure for billions of dollars in transactions. In fact, Open Horizon's Ambrosia product opens the door for electronic commerce beyond the trusted computer base of a LAN to the of ten unreliable environment of the Internet. Ambrosia offers guaranteed message delivery, transaction support, and comprehensive security around the core publish/subscribe messaging engine.

Contrary to the article's characterization of Ambrosia as based on CORBA, it is a pure publish/subscribe product implemented in Java. Ambrosia provides three levels of CORBA compliance to increase the flexibility of customer implementations, but it is not tied to CORBA. Finally, while you quoted our CEO, you left out our contact information: 650-869-2200; http://www.openhorizon.com .

Audrey Kalman
Director of marketing
Open Horizon, Inc.
South San Francisco, CA

While there are certainly billions of dollars being exchanged daily, these exchanges are done in systems carefully designed with limited sets of parties involved. There are no standards to allow economic exchange between independen t consumers and producers. The subscribing process needs to be opened, as the Webcasting folks are doing. Economic exchange is critical to that openness. While the article might have implied that Open Horizon works only as a CORBA-based product, this was certainly not the intent. That said, CORBA and Java are not mutually exclusive. -- Richard Hackathorn