Ardent Software Receives Frost & Sullivan's Market Engineering Marketing Strategy Award; Ardent Recognized For Exceptional Market and Partner Strategies.

WESTBORO, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 12, 1999--

Ardent Software, Inc. (Nasdaq:ARDT), a leading global data management software company, today announced that it received the prestigious Market Engineering Marketing Strategy Award from Frost & Sullivan, an international high-technology research firm that monitors the information technology (IT) industry for market trends, measurements and strategies. Frost & Sullivan awards recognize excellence in marketing strategy design and implementation, and are based on Frost & Sullivan's software industry research and consulting work.

"Ardent Software has leveraged its technology and marketing strategies effectively to boost its market share," said Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Norvin Leong. "Ardent maximized its strategic partnerships with several leading database vendors and accelerated its efforts to promote its integrated data warehousing solutions. This achievement reflects the effective execution of a well-conceived, strategic marketing plan."

"We are very pleased to receive the Frost & Sullivan Market Engineering award. Our strategy has always been focused on growth and leadership in the data management market," said Peter Gyenes, chairman, president and CEO of Ardent Software. "With the successful acquisition of Dovetail Software and Prism Solutions, we have increased our customer base, enhanced our offerings, and expanded our global presence. Today, Ardent is firmly positioned to deliver on its Enterprise Information Infrastructure initiative to provide a platform for the next generation of analytic and e-business applications."

Frost & Sullivan award recipients are selected from an in-depth analysis of market competitors and interviews with those companies. The Frost & Sullivan research management team has reviewed these awards and the criteria used to select the winners to ensure that the competition and award system are as fair as possible given the subjective nature of market analysis and competitive assessment.

The most recent initiative Ardent has implemented as part of its award-winning marketing strategy is the Enterprise Information Infrastructure (EII) initiative. EII is designed to enable organizations to deploy a single infrastructure to support a wide variety of strategic solutions, including e-business, analytical applications and enterprise information portals. The EII initiative builds upon Ardent's existing strength in structured data integration, is a direct response to the growing need to include unstructured information sources, and provides a uniform, enterprise-wide approach to information integration across data, applications and processes.

Ardent Software provides the information infrastructure for customers around the world, in applications including e-business, data warehousing, business intelligence, and enterprise portals. Ardent's DataStage Suite includes a complete data movement and integration solution with native access to data from mainframe, Unix, and Windows NT environments; data quality assurance capabilities; and full lifecycle meta data management; all complemented by industry-leading professional services.

About Ardent Software

Ardent Software is a leading global data management software company. Ardent develops and markets data integration software for data warehouse and analytical applications, and embedded databases and tools for developing and deploying packaged operational applications. With worldwide sales and service operations, and 1,000 resellers in more than 50 countries, Ardent is one of the top software companies in the world. More than 60,000 customers and 2.2 million users in virtually every aspect of business and government use applications powered by Ardent's products and technologies to solve their complex data management problems. Ardent is headquartered in Westboro, Massachusetts. The company's common stock trades on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol "ARDT." For more information, visit Ardent's web site at www.ardentsoftware.com.

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 10-K for the year ended December 31, 1998. Actual results may differ materially from management's expectations.

DataStage, Iterations, O2 Technology, Prism, RedBack, System Builder, UniData, UniVerse and wIntegrate are registered trademarks of Ardent Software, Inc. Other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of the respective trademark holders.