In 1992, a ground-breaking middleware product called the “OEC Toolkit” was released by a Cambridge, Mass. startup called Open Environment Corporation (“OEC”).

Open Environment temporarily changed the name of the OEC ToolKit to Encompass, and then later to Entera. Open Environment's product Entera was the first middleware product sold as a best-of-breed application server platform, at a time when the term “application server” had not been invented. In fact, even the terms “three-tier” or “multi-tier” architectures were only beginning to be recognized at that time, and OEC was one of the first companies to actually promote the benefits of such an architecture.

Renamed to Entera

Further enhancements by Open Environment included a 3 tier application monitor called AppMinder and a transaction system called Entera FX. Over the next 9 years, OEC would go on to sell tens of millions of dollars worth of Entera to at least 300 Fortune 1000 customers in all verticals including financial, retail, government, aerospace, transportation, utilities and Oil & Gas. Open Environment eventually went public with an IPO in 1995, and was later acquired in a buyout by Borland in 1996.

Fast Forward to 2002. Borland, who had never managed to successfully re-engineer their organization for enterprise sales, officially dropped support for Entera. This was the final mistake among the many that Borland had made along the way.

Shortly after, Borland licensed Entera source rights to eCube Systems, made up of former Open Environment (OEC) employees and former Entera architects who still believed in the product. eCube is not only committed to supporting and enhancing existing Entera installations, but also in updating Entera to NXTera, incorporating the new middleware technologies of the present time like J2EE, SOAP, XML, and Web Services. Having acquired the support contracts and consulting engagements to modernize Entera into NXTera, eCube Systems has enhanced the number of supported platforms and the performance of this very powerful middleware. The latest version of Entera, Version 4.2.1 was enhanced with newer memory management and DCE support and re-released as Entera 4.3. The newest version of Entera, NXTera Version 5.5 incorporates all of the features of Entera and provides new features like multi-threading with Posix pthreads and multiprotocol broker architecture.
For more information on pricing, upgrades or Entera migration, go to the eCube Systems Web site. www.ecubesystems.com.