Dwayne Cole

03/29/99

Let's Talk DRDA.

In his book "Information Rules" Mike Shipero talks about the impact of standards on economic activities of IT firms and companies who rely on IT technologies. A central point of his book was the hidden, yet significant impact that technical standards have on operation efficiency and profitability. He claims that technical standards can "lock-in"and "lock-out" and depending on whether a firm is the supplier or the consumer the concepts can either protect and sustain profitability or threaten and constrain efficiency and growth.

Recently, OpenGroup adopted IBM's DRDA (Distributed Relational Database Architecture) as a standard interoperability protocol for databases and applications. Support vendors, developers, and enterprise customers have all wrestle with getting disparate distributed database environments to seamlessly communicate. Although gateways and middleware helps smooth communication across DBMS platforms, OpenGroup's adoption of DRDA is step toward developing a set of standards that would facilitate the communication between DBMSs without sacrificing performance. The idea is that vendors will make DRDA native to their systems rather than compatible with their systems.

This is good news for customer because it will help them overcome being "locked-in" to a particular protocol. It would allow them to consider new systems based on the merit of their performance and not so much on compatibility. Although standards can benefit suppliers in so many ways, more often it threatens competitive advantage because so many vendors have used proprietary technology to "lock-out" competition and to "lock-in" customers. Perhaps it's because of this that there has only been marginal support for the new standard.