IBM ANNOUNCES PLANS TO SHIP SOM AND DSOM TECHNOLOGY IN SOMOBJECTS
DEVELOPER TOOLKIT

June 16, 1993

IBM's Personal Software Products Division today announced plans to
ship the SOMobjects* Developer Toolkit Version 2.0, the first
professional programming toolkit to incorporate IBM's System Object
Model (SOM) and Distributed System Object Model (DSOM) technologies.

SOMobjects is the first toolkit that meets the needs of today's
professional software developers in three important ways.  It allows
programmers to build software that is truly reusable, software
components that are language-neutral, and true distributed object
applications in a client-server environment.

The toolkit will ship directly from IBM in the third quarter of 1993.
Initially it will provide support for any ANSI standard C compiler,
Borland's C+ + compiler, and IBM Programming Systems division's C++
compilers for OS/2* and AIX*.  In addition, a significant cross-section
of application and tools software developers including Digitalk,
MetaWare, Raleigh Systems and Footprint Software have announced their
plans to support SOM.

The toolkit will be available for IBM's OS/2 and AIX/6000 platforms.
IBM and its business partners plan to deliver SOMobjects support on
additional platforms including:  IBM's mainframe and midrange operating
systems, the DOS Windows** environment and other UNIX systems.

SOMobjects is the first cross-language, cross-platform implementation
of the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker
Architecture (OMG's CORBA).  It is the most complete implementation
of the CORBA specification and addresses the challenge of bridging
among object-oriented language environments.

Today, IBM and HP announced an agreement to work together on CORBA
implementations.  The two companies agreed exchanges of technology
between them will allow each of their CORBA implementations to be
both compatible and interoperable.

SOMobjects offers programmers an architecture in which they
can define and manage binary class libraries of object-oriented
software.

SOMobjects' DSOM technology builds on SOM's strength to provide
support for object interactions across multi-platform networks.

IBM SOMobjects Developer Toolkit Version 2.0 includes these
major components:  SOM/IDL Compiler (OMG CORBA IDL); Distributed
SOM; language bindings for C and C++; Emitter Framework;
Collection Classes Framework; Replication and Persistence
Frameworks; and Workstation Run Times.

The SOMobjects Developer Toolkit begins shipping during the third
quarter 1993.  All products are available from IBM at 1-800-342-6672.

*    Trademark or registered trademark of International
     Business Machines Corporation.

**   Trademark or registered trademark of Microsoft
     Corporation.