Object Technology International

Object Technology International (OTI) was a Canadian company based in Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

History
Originally founded in 1988 to commercialise an embedded Smalltalk system that had been developed by the Object Oriented Research Group at Carleton University, under the Object Utopia program that in addition to OTI, also begot the "Object People" and "Object Time" companies. OTI sold the system under the name ENVY/Smalltalk and while it gained some noteworthy customers including Tektronix, it did in general fail to set the world alight.

The source control system Orwell that OTI used did on the other hand generate a lot of interest and the company introduced it under the name ENVY/Developer, initially for their own Smalltalk product only but soon thereafter a version compatible with the Smalltalk products of Digitalk and a little later for other commercial Smalltalk variants.

ENVY/Developer was primarily sold as a solution to the problem of managing code generated by large groups of programmers, and it was successful enough to lead the company to place more emphasis on that than their ENVY/Smalltalk product (renamed ENVY/Embedded) and focus primarily on ENVY/Developer and developing new RAD tools and Smalltalk related utilities.

The company was acquired by IBM in February 1996 and become a subsidiary of IBM Canada Ltd.

The ENVY product line was integrated into the VisualAge Smalltalk Enterprise edition and later into the VisualAge for Java development system. OTI was kept as an independent company though, and when IBM converted their internal programming tools from Smalltalk to Java. OTI was put in place as caretaker of what remained of IBM's Smalltalk based tools, including VA Java, VA Smalltalk and VA ME.

When VisualAge Java was re-written in Java to become Eclipse, and VA ME & VisualAge Smalltalk sold or licensed to third parties sometime after the turn of the century, what remained of OTI was integrated into the IBM Canada operation.

Products

 * ENVY/Actra
 * ENVY/App
 * ENVY/C Development - support for managing C/C++ source code
 * ENVY/Developer - version and configuration management
 * ENVY/Embedded
 * ENVY/Expert
 * ENVY/Manager (Later integrated into some versions of ENVY/Developer)
 * ENVY/Packager
 * ENVY/QA
 * ENVY/Replicator - Distributed Component Management
 * ENVY/Smalltalk

Personnel

 * Dave Thomas (CEO)
 * Brian Barry (CTO, later CEO)
 * Adrian Cho

Links

 * Dave Thomas: You Can’t Do That With Smalltalk! - Can You? Lessons From The Past – Challenges For The Future.