Compelling Business Reasons

Some other compelling business reasons why an infrastructure like COM and DCOM may finally be able to deliver on the component based computing promise include:

(disclaimer: intense sales pitch coming up)

• Preservation of existing investment: current software can be 'wrapped' and participate in the DCOM component computing world regardless of its current implementation platform.
  
  
• Autonomy through distributed business-rule components, allowing components encapsulating business-rules to reside and be maintained by the authority group which decides and implements them.
  
  
• Efficient and effective use of low-cost commodity computing resources; many mainframe or mini-class solutions can be migrated to fault-tolerant clusters of inexpensive microcomputers, greatly reducing deployment and maintenance costs.
  
  
• Potentially unlimited scalability for server solutions: ongoing developments in DCOM and related support services will soon enable very large server systems which can handle very large databases (up to a terabyte) and very high transaction rates (up to a million transactions per day). In a recent industry summit, Microsoft's Bill Gates has made a commitment to deliver this in 1997.
  
  
• Enable distributed workflow computing: a choice of scripting languages is available for creating workflow applications orchestrating the action of various business-rule components over a network using DCOM.
  
  
• Lower cost of development and support: the platform and language independence provided by DCOM enable an organization to use existing programming and design expertise, say in COBOL or BASIC, to develop and maintain reusable software components. (MicroFocus COBOL can create native COM components!)
  
  
• Delivery over diverse heterogeneous environments: the support of DCOM over both TCP/IP, IPX/SPX and many other transports, coupled with the implementation of DCOM on UNIX, Macs, and other systems allows deployment of DCOM over existing network and computing resources without additional investment.
  
  
• 'Riding the power curve': the ability to leverage the currently available commodity microprocessor based technologies and apply them to new or legacy problems that formerly required very expensive dedicated or niche computing equipment.
  
  
• DCOM can work securely through an intranet, the public Internet, or over virtual private networks enabled through the Internet today making objects location-independent.