DBStar and Transtar sign U.S.-European cross-licensing agreement; Partnership focused on solving legacy data problems.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 26, 1996--Transtar SA and DBStar Inc. today announced that the two companies have signed a cross-licensing agreement to offer their complementary open information repository and legacy system migration products to large organizations for use in migration, data warehousing and Year 2000 projects.

Under the terms of the agreement, DBStar will resell the Transtar Repository in North America and Transtar will resell the DBStar Migration Architect in Europe. The two companies are engaged in joint product development and integration efforts to further address the Year 2000 problem.

"Legacy systems, organized in rigid application-specific `stovepipe silos' and storing vast amounts of data in pre-relational data structures, present a strategic problem in responding to the ever-increasing demands placed on information systems in our competitive worlds," said Dr. Dina Bitton, president and CEO of DBStar Inc. "Organizations have made enormous investments in legacy resources over the decades, yet these systems have not been able to adapt to changing business requirements."

"We believe that unifying the system information produced by and through a wide variety of tools is critical in attacking the difficult problems associated with big legacy systems, where 80 percent of the production data is still managed in a pre-relational way," said Herve Yahi, Transtar president and CEO.

"Transtar has created a `software backplane' that allows modeling tools and database directories to be `plugged in' and meaningfully share their models and results with each other," Yahi said. "However, the majority of modeling tools are most effective in new system development and cannot say what is actually in large legacy systems. This is especially true when one needs an integrated view that spans stovepipe barriers."

"The effort to migrate legacy systems to more modern technologies, warehouse the data they produce for more effective decision making, or even protect them from the coming Year 2000 century date change, is made extremely difficult by their size and complexity," Bitton said. "DBStar's Migration Architect product makes a major contribution to unraveling and managing this complexity, but the cooperation of a number of tools that address the many different dimensions of the problem is required.

"That is why we teamed up with Transtar. The Transtar Repository provides the glue that links the system information available in all major databases as well as that generated by most modeling tools," Bitton said. "Although these tools and databases use their own concepts and terminology internally, the unique Transtar Repository translates such information into a common neutral format, making it available to us. Likewise, the critical business rule knowledge about existing systems we derive through our tool becomes available to others that need it, making large-scale legacy projects viable. Only the Transtar Repository," Bitton said, "has the richness to manage not only data and metadata, but also business rules."

"We selected DBStar as a partner because their unique technology can automatically derive business rules and other necessary knowledge about existing legacy systems, even across these stovepipe barriers, making migration, data warehousing and Year 2000 protection a lower cost, lower risk proposition," Yahi said. "Through our Repository, other tools can then tap into this rich knowledge and enhance their capabilities not just in the construction phase, but throughout the life-cycle of the target system as well."

Besides DBStar's Migration Architect, the Transtar Repository supports links to Powersoft's PowerBuilder and S-Designor, Logic Works' Erwin, Bachman's Bachman Analyst, Sterling's (KnowledgeWare) ADW and IEW, Oracle's CASE*Dictionary and Designer 2000, Intersolv's Excelerator/IS, Texas Instruments' IEF/BAA and others. It runs on Bull DPX/20 and IBM RS/6000 running AIX, Sun running Solaris and i86 running NT supporting DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and NT clients.

About Transtar Repository

The Transtar Repository is a integration platform that allows an organization to store, manage, access and share information about its business environment and its software systems. It helps break the barriers between separate database dictionaries and CASE tool models by building internal models of how tools and subsystems structure their information descriptions, and then transforms those descriptions into neutral, shareable objects within a standards-based, open repository.

About DBStar Migration Architect

The DBStar Migration Architect is an automated tool to reverse engineer, consolidate and integrate heterogeneous legacy databases such as VSAM, IMS, IDMS, Datacom, relational or external data sources. It derives business rules and other associated knowledge about legacy systems which are represented as an accurate "as-is" relational data model of any source system of record. Data synonyms and homonyms are detected and rationalized across stovepipe boundaries. The DBStar Migration Architect runs on Sun SPARC-compatible systems running the Solaris operating system. Several varieties of X-Window emulators can be used for client support.

About Transtar SA

Transtar SA provides repository based products, bundled solutions and services for the integration and management of information and development resources. A joint venture between Groupe Bull, a $5.5 billion information technology company; and Thomson-CSF, an $11 billion electronics and aerospace firm; Transtar develops and markets a modular offering based on its open business repository, Transtar Repository, which addresses the needs of MIS departments for metadata administration and interpretability among CASE tools. Transtar positions itself as the key element within migration, data warehousing and Year 2000 projects along with enterprise applications management.

Transtar is headquartered at 14, rue de la Ferme, 92100 Boulogne, France. Telephone: [phone], facsimile: 331-4694-7799, email: [e-mail] and http://www.transtar.com on the Web. US operations are located at 300 Concord Rd., Billerica, Mass. 01821. Telephone: [phone], facsimile: 508-294-4405, email: [e-mail].

About DBStar Inc.

DBStar Inc., provides automated tools to consolidate and integrate heterogeneous legacy databases. After a decade of university research in database design, reliability and performance, Dr. Dina Bitton founded DBStar in 1993 to productize and market the powerful technologies now incorporated into its automated suite of software tools, centered around DBStar Migration Architect.

DBStar is headquartered at 185 Berry St., Suite 5501, San Francisco, California 94107. Telephone: [phone], facsimile: 415-512-0302, email [e-mail]

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NOTE: A backgrounder document is also available upon request.

Transtar, the Transtar logo, and the Transtar Repository are trademarks of Transtar.

DBStar, the DBStar logo and Migration Architect are trademarks of DBStar Inc.

All trademarks, service marks and company names are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: DB Star Inc.

Dale W. Way

415/512-0300

[e-mail]

or

Transtar Software (U.S.)

Christine Squires

508/294-3393

[e-mail]

http://www.transtar.com

or

Transtar SA (France)

Jean-Claude Bellando

(33-1) 46 94 77 52

[e-mail]

http://www.transtar.com