Cohera Corporation Announces Revolutionary Data Federation System That Unifies Enterprise Data in Real-time.

HAYWARD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 29, 1999--Cohera Corporation, the leading provider of Data Federation Systems (DFS), today launched its flagship product, Cohera 1.1. The company's Data Federation System is middleware that federates independent enterprise data sources - regardless of location or structure - and makes them look and act like a single, large SQL database, in real-time.

Cohera solves the problem of inadequate enterprise data integration - one of the most taxing and expensive dilemmas facing business managers and information technology professionals alike. The ability to create unified views of disparate information is critical for effective decision-making. Data warehouses integrate subsets of a company's information, but most data sources remain separated - in departmental systems, mainframes, PCs, web servers, and even within multiple data marts.

By enabling real-time unified views of data across the enterprise, Cohera is positioned to become a fundamental piece of the enterprise integration infrastructure.

Cohera was founded in 1997 by Dr. Michael Stonebraker, world-renowned database researcher and technology visionary, who previously started Ingres Corporation and Illustra Information Technologies. Dr. Stonebraker is chief technology officer of Cohera. The company is backed by premier venture capital firms including Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sippl-Macdonald Ventures and Merrill Lynch. Cohera's customer advisory board consists of senior IT executives from Federal Express, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Cisco Systems, TRW and Deloitte Consulting.

"Cohera is based on five years of Mike Stonebraker's research at U. C. Berkeley into global distributed systems design," said Mike Laven, Cohera president and chief executive officer. "That industry-leading technological underpinning - coupled with real-world input from our blue-chip advisory board which, incidentally, regularly contributes to product design reviews - has resulted in a breakthrough that solves some of IT's most pressing and strategic problems."

Cohera Solves The Hard Problems

Cohera's Data Federation System (DFS) is unique in its ability to solve the hardest problems in enterprise data integration. Only Cohera can federate independent information sources - making them appear and act as one without losing their independence and local control.

Cohera hides the location and structure of disparate data, making it easy for end-users to get the information they need. It brings together the historical context of the data warehouse with the current view of production systems, providing decision-makers true perspective on the state of their business. Cohera unifies data marts to give a full picture of product costs, risk exposure, claim information, and so on. With its ability to perform data transformation and aggregation on the fly, Cohera can create data warehouse prototypes, to reduce project risk, cost and time to market.

"Nearly all CIOs of Fortune 1000 companies face the same problem - business operations are decentralized, yet business analysis needs to be centralized for best decision-making," Dr. Stonebraker stated. "Enterprise application integration, data warehouses and messaging technologies all have their place. Only Cohera's DFS allows users to query a collection of enterprise databases as though they were at a single site."

"Cohera is solving the tough problem of seamlessly reintegrating enterprise-level data that is widely distributed across today's information-technology-independent business units", said Peter Kastner, Chief Research Officer at Aberdeen Group, an information industry research firm. "The savings in database administrator labor costs alone could justify the acquisition of Cohera's DFS 1.1."

Cohera is differentiated by the ability to:

-- Retain local independence - Administrators of local systems

retain control over who gets access to data. Operational

systems are not brought to their knees by real-time decision

support queries.

-- Transform dissimilar data on the fly - Cohera transforms

data from different systems into a common format. Warehouses

do this during the extract-transform-load process. Only

Cohera performs data transformation on the fly.

-- Deliver dynamic load balancing - Cohera's unique

architecture provides dynamic load balancing across the

distributed machines and data sources in the federation. The

result is distributed query processing that is orders of

magnitude faster than in traditional systems. Cohera

automatically adapts to changing system conditions to

deliver top performance at all times.

-- Scale to enterprise levels - Cohera's unique economic-model

architecture allows local systems to determine the work they

can perform at any given time. Though typical integration

projects will start with only a few data sources, many of

these projects will grow to handle multiple departments and

even companies. Only Cohera can start small and grow to

support hundreds of data sources. Related technologies such

as distributed databases or gateways can typically only

support two or three data sources.

Cohera 1.1 - Feature Rich

Among the many distinguishing features of Cohera DFS is Local Access-Policy Control, which allows administrators of each system in a federation to set policies about who gets access to the system's data. Cohera allows the best of both worlds - users get the information they need, and system owners retain control of their operations.

Cohera's Adaptive Query Engine delivers dynamic load balancing and throughput while accounting for network-load, local system capacity and load, as well as data replicas. With adapters for web pages as well as standard corporate data sources, Cohera can seamlessly integrate HTML and XML pages into the data federation.

Cohera also delivers maximum flexibility for data replication, using either existing third-party replication systems or its own internal cross-platform replicator. The product is standards-based, reducing the learning curve, risk and cost. Applications communicate with Cohera via standard SQL 92.

Cohera 1.1 runs on Windows NT and Sun SPARC platforms, and supports Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, DB2, Informix Online Dynamic Server, HTML pages and XML pages as data sources.

Pricing starts at $150,000 for an initial data federation, training and configuration. The product will be available on May 1, 1999.

About Cohera

Headquartered in Hayward, Calif., and founded in October 1997, Cohera Corporation is the leader in data federation systems for integrating enterprise-wide information in real time. Cohera is backed by top-tier investors including Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital, Sippl-Macdonald Ventures and Merrill Lynch. Cohera's customer advisory board includes senior IT executives from Federal Express (NYSE:FDX), Merrill Lynch (NYSE:MER), Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC), Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), TRW (NYSE:TRW), and Deloitte Consulting. Cohera can be reached at 1.510.780.1700 or visit Cohera at www.cohera.com.