Abstract: The present invention provides for an integrated plant environment which includes a business computing environment, such as an IBM environment, to run business programs that manage business aspects of the plant, a second, different computing environment, such as a DEC environment, configured to run manufacturing programs that control production of products, a gateway configured to allow communication between the business programs and the manufacturing programs, and an advanced program-to-program server which enables communication between the two different computing environments. The present invention also includes a method for interfacing programs in a first computing environment with programs in a second computing environment.