Unisys Corp. has been brokering a thaw in the relationship between Microsoft and the Needham, Mass., standards body that had become strained while Microsoft was still a member of the group, said sources. The two sides effectively parted ways in the late 1990s over the OMG's support for Common Object Request Broker Architecture, which competed with Microsoft's Component Object Model for a standard distributed computing model.
Sources said Microsoft is now warming up to the OMG because the Redmond, Wash., company is delving more into modeling and architecture work, two areas where the OMG holds key specifications and expertise—in UML (Unified Modeling Language) and MDA (Model Driven Architecture). Microsoft has sponsored two four-day OMG Web services workshops this year, one in Munich, Germany, and one last month in Philadelphia, where Microsoft representatives gave presentations on services-oriented architectures and MDA issues.
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