DCE stands for the Distributed Computing Environment. With DCE, the Open Group has established a standard set of services and interfaces that facilitate the creation, use, and maintenance of client-server applications. The DCE for OpenVMS serves as the basis for an open computing environment where networks of multi-vendor systems appear as a single system to the user. Since DCE makes the underlying networks and operating systems transparent, application developers can easily build portable, interoperable client-server applications.
Users can locate and share information safely and easily across the entire enterprise.
The DCE for OpenVMS supplies system managers with a set of tools to consistently manage the entire distributed computing environment, while also assuring the integrity of the enterprise. DCE provides security services such as authentication and authorization based on Kerberos technology to protect and control access to data and name services that make it easy to find distributed resources. DCE's multi-threading capabilities provides a high performance and scaleable model for organizing widely scattered users, services and data.