Tune In For IBM, Sun, Microsoft SOAP Opera.

Microsoft is poised to drop its DCOM for use in Internet technology and replace it with SOAP -- its newer, Simple Object Access Protocol -- an industry consultant said. David Smith, a GartnerGroup analyst following Microsoft, said the move could force competitors such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, and others to develop their own strategies for deploying or using SOAP with applications. "DCOM is pretty much dead on the Internet," said Smith, in a presentation at the GartnerGroup Symposium/ITxpo at the Disney Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Fla. "Sun, Netscape, and IBM are all going to have to do something with SOAP very shortly," he said. "There will be a Sun version of SOAP, an IBM version of SOAP. It_ll become a real SOAP opera." Smith said there will still be a place for DCOM on intranets and LANs, but it has not succeeded on the Internet. "SOAP is going to be a major platform and will start to roll out in the next six months," he said. Microsoft was not immediately available for comment on the platform. However, company president Steven Ballmer was slated to take part in a "Microsoft Town Meeting" at the Gartner conference later in the day. One attendee, an IT manager for a federal government agency who asked not to be named, said he thought the move to SOAP as a new platform, viable for the Internet, was a good one. "Microsoft wants to expand on the Internet, and that_s great," he said. "And then they take SOAP, and wrap it in XML, and that+s really something. Services off the Internet is something we want."