British Aerospace Airbus, CSC and ICL in $2.43 million, 5-year contract for ICL'S DAIS object technology; BAe will be the largest CORBA site in the world.

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 4, 1997--Today at Object World East '97 in Boston, ICL Inc. announced the signing of a 5-year, $2.43 million contract for the use of ICL's DAIS Object Request Broker in British Aerospace Airbus' very large, very mixed IT environment.

The contract calls for up to 8,000 DAIS licenses overall in what will be the largest implementation of CORBA-compliant object technology in the world.

BAe uses a mixture of IBM mainframes, Digital and Unix midrange systems, armies of PC's, and an even broader mix of home-built systems and packaged application software, all of which are managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) under a 10-year outsourcing partnership. As new and better hardware and systems became available, BAe needed to be able to take advantage of them quickly, and a computing model complying with CORBA standards for common objects was developed.

BAe determined that a solution based on object technology was probably inevitable, that there was probably no other option if they were to succeed in uniting the IT function with changing business needs. The company considered that the object approach offered significant advantages over a simple "best of breed" package strategy.

Breaking through the "electronic cement"

"We believe packages have a lot of merit," said Joe Schechter, head of IT at the company, "and we are moving towards their use in many areas -- such as our new computer-aided design and engineering data management. But to us, the ability to integrate those packages is the key. While packages offer flexibility early on, they can become a kind of electronic cement: once you've implemented them, you're faced with the task of breaking them apart when your business processes change."

His alternative is to generate a business model that will define what he calls a `thick infrastructure' of system components and services that will be distributed on ICL's DAIS ORB.

"We expect to achieve flexibility by placing a thin application layer on top of that, which reflects the organization and the process changes." He added that "the architecture will allow the company to choose the best applications when they are needed -- whether sourced externally or developed in-house -- and remove them when business processes change."

Three-month pilot study completed

According to Francis Hayden, BAe's Object Strategy Consultant and the man who is the architect behind the new approach, selection of DAIS was based on three criteria: product capability, partnering capability, and price. The "partnering" component was well tested in a three-month pilot study which also involved the installation of ICL's i500 Enterprise Directory Server.

Access to the directory was enabled via a bridge that expresses the directory's functionality to CORBA clients, and a Java front-end was produced to demonstrate CORBA/Java integration. Now the company is consolidating a roll-out of the distributed object architecture to all of its 8,000 end users.

When British Aerospace's project is completed and becomes the world's largest CORBA implementation, it will displace another ICL installation for the title. The U.K.'s Home Office Immigration Service, which uses a DAIS-based system to check passports against a central database of persons who might be refused entry into the country, currently is the largest CORBA site.

About ICL Inc.

ICL is the U.S. software marketing arm of ICL PLC, a $5B global IT firm that supplies integrated systems and services. In addition to DAIS, ICL is also the developer of the i500 Enterprise Directory Server and Dialogue Manager, which provides desktop access to legacy databases.

ICL Inc. is headquartered at 11490 Commerce Park Drive, Reston, Virginia 20191, and can be reached by phone at 703/648-3300, by fax at 703/648-3350, or on the Internet at http://www.icl.com/dais .

CONTACT: ICL Inc.

Anne Prine, 714/855-5505

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Mesa Communications Inc.

Lisa Wilson, 303/220-1971

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