Ardent Software Acquires Dovetail Software; Patented Meta Data Technology Eases Enterprise Data Warehouse Administration.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 15, 1998--Ardent Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:ARDT), a global data management software company, today announced that it has acquired the assets of Dovetail Software, Inc., a meta data transformation technology company based in Billerica, Mass. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The core group of Dovetail employees will relocate to Ardent's Westboro offices.

Dovetail's technology resolves the difficult problem of meta data management and reuse, a major challenge for companies implementing enterprise-level data management solutions using diverse tools and environments. The acquisition fits squarely with Ardent's mission to automate and simplify the management of data warehouse environments and is another important step in Ardent's drive to offer a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for the development, deployment and administration of enterprise data warehouses.

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Meta data provides descriptive information about the content, quality, condition and characteristics of the data stored in a data warehouse. Most tools create, store and publish meta data according to proprietary schema, making it extremely difficult for users to employ data warehouse tools from multiple vendors. Dovetail's recently patented Interplay technology(1), ten years in development, tackles this problem by serving as a type of universal translator. Using a "hub-and-spoke" architecture for enabling meta data interoperability, this solution allows tools and applications - without modification - to easily share their meta data. The hub works as a type of super-repository where the meta data is decomposed into its atomic elements, with the spokes acting as brokers that facilitate the exchange of meta data itself.

Traditional approaches to meta data sharing are insufficient because they require changes to a tool's internal data model or custom bridging code that is expensive, complex and error-prone. Dovetail's technology requires no changes to the tools while ensuring complete and accurate meta data.

"With the acquisition of Dovetail, Ardent has taken a leadership role in addressing a long standing industry problem," said Peter Fiore, vice president and general manager of Ardent's Data Warehouse business unit. "Our vision is to simplify the automation of data warehouse management at the enterprise level and we see meta data as the key to achieving that goal. Dovetail's technology is an important step in that direction, enabling customers to easily combine best-of-breed tools to develop their data warehouses. With this technology, they will no longer have to worry whether or not these tools can work together."

A SOLUTION FOR ENTERPRISE WAREHOUSING

David Gray, ETT Strategy Manager at Capital One, an Ardent customer and one of the top ten issuers of MasterCard and Visa credit cards said, "Capital One's Information Based Strategy relies on our associates' ability to integrate leading technology with our dynamic business. Meta data management has been a key component in administering our enterprise data warehouse, and we are working closely with Ardent to constantly improve it. We believe Ardent's approach, combined with Dovetail's technology, will be able to address warehouse administration and meta data at the enterprise level in the near future."

"This acquisition will undoubtedly provide us with significant time-to-market and product advantages, while strengthening our relationships with partners who provide complementary products," continued Fiore. Beyond the data warehousing market, Ardent sees the potential for application of Dovetail's technology in other key areas of its business. "Overall, this acquisition strengthens our position as a leading data management software provider and will help us to exploit synergies across all of our product lines," he concluded.

Dovetail Software, formerly known as IntegraSoft, Inc., developed meta data transformation solutions. Based on ten years of research, the company's patented Interplay technology enables meta data exchange among the most popular software tools and supports industry standards such as the CASE Data Interchange Format (CDIF), the Object Management Group (OMG) Unified Modeling Language (UML) standard, and the Meta data Interchange Standard (MDIS). Founded in 1996, Dovetail Software was privately held and had its headquarters in Billerica, Massachusetts.

About Ardent Software

Ardent Software is a data management company with a range of software products, including database systems and data warehouse development tools. Its products include the O2 System(R), a high-performance object database management system; DataStage(R), a data warehouse development tool; and UniVerse(R) and UniData(R), extended relational database management systems for packaged business applications. With worldwide sales and service operations, as well as 1,000 resellers in more than 50 countries, Ardent is one of the top software companies in the world. More than 50,000 customers and over 2,000,000 users in virtually every aspect of business and government use Ardent's products to overcome their most complex data management problems.

Additional information is available on Ardent's web site at www.ardentsoftware.com, or you can contact the company at Ardent Software, Inc., 50 Washington Street, Westboro, Mass. 01581-1021. Telephone: [phone]. Facsimile: 508-389-8737.

(1) U.S. Patent No. 5,727,158 covers Dovetail Software's implementation of the Interplay technology for software tool collaboration. Interplay is the cornerstone of metadata transformation solutions from Dovetail Software.

Statements expressing the beliefs and expectations of management regarding future performance are forward-looking and involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, quarterly fluctuations in results and other risks. These risks are detailed from time to time in the Company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including the Company's Form 10K for the year ended December 31, 1997. Actual results may differ materially from management's expectations.

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