Encina, a two-tier family of transaction processing products, is discussed. The first tier is the Encina Toolkit, which provides the fundamental components upon which to build distributed transaction systems. The Encina Toolkit is portable across UNIX and other operating systems. It is built upon the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (OSF DCE). The second tier is a collection of products built on top of the Encina Toolkit and the OSF DCE. These products include a transaction processing monitor, two recoverable resource managers, and a transactional communications gateway for interoperability with mainframe systems, such as CICS. Using a two-tiered approach has made it very easy to build this family of products because the infrastructure for the second tier products is provided by the Encina Toolkit and the OSF DCE. >