Computer Associates Brings Harmony to Information Chaos.

NEW ORLEANS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 1998--

Comprehensive Information Infrastructure "Future Proofs" IT

Investments By Unifying User Interfaces And Data Sources

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced Harmony, a comprehensive information infrastructure that allows organizations to exploit new technologies while integrating existing applications and data sources. Unprecedented in its scope, Harmony provides an extensible, vendor-neutral, standards-friendly platform on which CA and other vendors can build durable solutions.

IT professionals have struggled to rationalize change since the computer industry began, but until now there has been no open solution to the problem of seamlessly integrating new technology with existing systems. Harmony "future proofs" IT investments by enabling users to create modern information applications, integrate them with existing applications and databases, unify their user interfaces, and deploy them in a distributed, heterogeneous environment.

"For the first time, the industry has a strategy that offers meaningful relief from the complexities of integrating new systems with existing investments," said CA Chairman and CEO Charles B. Wang. "Unlike restrictive strategies or hybrid architectures that limit opportunities, Harmony opens the gates for innovation and participation by other vendors and delivers nothing less than an infrastructure for realizing maximum business value from IT investments new and old."

By deploying "Harmonized" products from both CA and elsewhere, businesses will streamline the adoption of new technologies while leveraging their existing IT investments. This serves several key goals of enterprises today: expand business opportunities by reaching new audiences, offer new products and services, and reduce time-to-market.

"Clearly, Harmony is an innovative strategy that should resonate with customers, as much because it enables the creation of interactive, accessible web-fluent applications, as because it reinvigorates 'legacy' applications and their associated support systems," said Peter Kastner, chief research officer, Aberdeen Group.

Road To Harmony

To realize these benefits, CA and its partners offer a growing number of "Harmonized" solutions and management functions. The first CA deliverables include:

-- Opal, which provides Web-based GUIs for integration of existing

legacy applications

-- Ingres II, which enables users to build n-tier relational

applications with modern Web interfaces

-- CA-IDMS and CA-DATACOM, powerful enterprise servers with Web

access

-- Jasmine, which enables users to build next generation multimedia,

Internet applications using pure object technologies

Available immediately, the Harmony solutions support access to numerous non-CA databases, including DB2, IMS and Oracle, and technologies such as Java, HTML and ActiveX.

"Harmonized" CA products can take advantage of a common underlying infrastructure that will provide key services and capabilities based primarily on core CA technologies. These include object database, repository, distributed transaction management, distributed naming, messaging services; common user interface technology, and management services such as scheduling, security, routing, and software distribution.

Industry-supported and de facto standards embraced by the Harmony strategy include Web browsers, Java, and object standards such as RMI, ActiveX, CORBA, DCOM, VRML and XML. Thus, CA users will automatically gain a powerful infrastructure that will seamlessly support new applications provided by CA and its partners that make use of these standards.

Over the next 18 months, CA will deliver additions to Harmony that will include:

-- Neural-net technology for information analysis, pattern

recognition, and anomaly detection -- of particular use in business

applications such as fraud detection, cash/credit management, and

information mining;

-- The ability to wrap mainframe applications into objects for use

within the Harmony environment;

-- Component creation from CA-Datacom and CA-IDMS information that

can then be used anywhere within the Harmony infrastructure; and

-- Access to "non-database" information sources such as email,

messaging systems, and business applications.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 11,000 people in 160 offices in 43 countries and had revenue of $4.5 billion in calendar year 1997. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com on the World Wide Web, emailing [e-mail], or calling 1-516-342-5224. -0- All referenced product names are trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Bob Gordon, [phone] or [e-mail]