A program written at Washington University has helped The Boeing Company put Navy bombs on target and attracted support from an all-star cast of U.S. and foreign corporations, ranging from Motorola to Siemens.
Now, St. Louis-based computer consulting firm Object Computing, Inc., wants to build a new business around the program.
The software program, called TAO, is a form of "middleware" that allows other programs to work smoothly together.
The program's "source code," or guts, is free for the downloading. Unlike the source code for proprietary programs such as Microsoft's Windows, programmers can add to it freely.
Potential corporate users need to be sure someone can help them install it, maintain it, and train their employees to use it, according to the program's main author, Washington U. professor Doug Schmidt. That's where Object Computing comes in.
Object Computing and Washington U. signed an agreement last December under which Object Computing will market TAO and sell its support services to industry users.
Since the source code is open, there's nothing to stop a rival company from going into the same business. But Object Computing will have preferred access to Schmidt and the "Distributed Object Computing" group that developed TAO.
Malcolm Spence, who is in charge of the TAO project for Object Computing, said software such as TAO is going to become more important on corporate networks and even the Internet.
TAO is an "object request broker" that can take computing requests from clients, figure out where on the network the necessary programing power resides, and arrange to get the job done.
Several commercial object request brokers already are on the market, Spence said.
About 30 million computers are using a program sold by Utah-based Imprise, and another 100,000 machines use a program sold by Dublin, Ireland-based Iona Technology.
With TAO, Object Computing is aiming to replace these commercial programs, he said. Another prime market for TAO is machines using the Linux operating system, another open source program that is enjoying rapid growth.
Also, there are many industrial products in which TAO could be useful, Spence said, such as medical devices, power distribution equipment, and airplanes.
Although the official TAO product launch won't come until this summer, Object Computing already is working with a Korea's Goldstar as it tries to develop a "set-top box" that would have little computing power itself but would allow TV viewers to tap into the Internet.
Spence and his team of 50 programmers also have been to Germany to help the medical equipment division of Siemens work TAO into its products.
While he declined to discuss sales projections, Spence said Object Computing has been in touch with venture capitalists: "We need to be prepared to deal with rapid growth."
Schmidt said 16 corporations – through grants and research contracts – have put about $6 million into TAO's research over the past four years.
One of the biggest supporters is Boeing, which hopes to cut costs by using software to stitch together program components for computer systems in its airplanes, rather than creating an entirely new system for every airplane.
Bryan Doerr, a software engineer at Boeing in St. Louis, said the company can reuse its own software components and even use commercial software in airplane's software systems.
Until a few years ago, using object request brokers such as TAO wasn't fast enough for the likes of an airplane's software systems.
"Use of an object request broker in a real-time job had only fancifully been considered," Doerr said.
But Boeing could see the concept was good and has given Schmidt's group a number of contracts in recent years to solve problems using object-request-broker technology. Doerr declined to discuss dollar amounts.
Much of the software that came out of these contracts became the property of Boeing, but often the results included portions with general utility that then became part of TAO itself.
According to Schmidt's Web site, a system developed by Boeing incorporating his TAO technology was used last November in a test-bombing run in California. The test was designed to explore the suitability of a TAO-like object request broker in avionics.
originally published at: http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/1999/05/10/focus12.html?page=all
-Larry Holyoke
