DIAMOND SHAMROCK CONVERTS ITS MAINFRAME APPLICATIONS TO LAWSON'S CLIENT/SERVER SOFTWARE; Lawson and Sybase Team Up to Deliver Best-of-Breed Solution.

MINNEAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 3, 1995--Diamond Shamrock, Inc., a regional refiner and marketer of petroleum products in the United States, is replacing its financial and human resources mainframe applications with enterprise-wide client/server business applications from Lawson Software as part of a sweeping re-engineering of its critical business processes.

Lawson, a leading client/server business application vendor, in tandem with Sybase, Inc., an enterprise client/server company, is supplying integrated accounting, materials management and human resource applications that will use Sybase's SQL Server 10.

Lawson's accounts payable, purchase order, general ledger and project accounting applications went into production at Diamond Shamrock in January, and the remaining financial applications are scheduled for May implementation. At that time, all mainframe financial application processing will be discontinued. Lawson Human Resources products are scheduled for August 1995 implementation. Diamond Shamrock has targeted December 1995 to end all mainframe processing.

Diamond Shamrock selected Lawson's applications after a comprehensive evaluation process involving 25 vendors and more than 70 end users. The four vendors who made the short list, including Lawson, Oracle, Dun & Bradstreet Software and SAP, were carefully scored in a series of detailed technical and business functional evaluations. In 1994, Diamond Shamrock selected the Sybase RDBMS from a short list comprised of Sybase and Oracle, both of which Lawson supports.

Diamond Shamrock chose a three-tiered client/server model in an open-systems environment to replace its mainframe-based enterprise applications. According to Chuck Oakes, Diamond Shamrock's manager of client/server computing and network technology, Lawson's ability to bring previously inaccessible corporate data resources to those who need it was a key factor in its decision. "We felt Lawson was the only vendor with a true client/server, three-tier architecture," said Oakes.

"Diamond Shamrock wants better and faster information analysis and decision-making to give us real-world benefits like enhanced user productivity, greater efficiency and lower overall costs," he added. "The flexibility, integration and technical strength of Lawson's client/server architecture will make key information resources readily accessible to our large end-user community to give our company the competitive advantage we need."

Gary Vasey, director of oil and gas industry solutions at Sybase, said, "Diamond Shamrock needed a flexible, open, distributed client/server architecture to support its re-engineered processes. The partnership between Sybase and Lawson is a perfect example of how technology vendors can provide `best of breed' application solutions to support customers' business requirements." Lawson Software, founded in 1975, specializes in enterprise-wide accounting, human resources, distribution and materials management software applications. Lawson Open Enterprise solutions support the leading hardware platforms and databases.

Lawson was recently ranked among the leading client/server business application vendors by International Data Corporation and was listed among the top five vendors of client/server financial applications by Price Waterhouse LLP and Information Week magazine. Last year, in an independent study reported in Computerworld magazine, Lawson financial applications rated highest in customer satisfaction among Fortune 500 companies using client/server software.

Headquartered in Minneapolis, Lawson has North American offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, and plans to open new offices this year in Washington, D.C., and Seattle. The company's European operations are based in London, with offices in France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

Diamond Shamrock, a Fortune 200 corporation with annual sales of 2.6 billion, is based in San Antonio, and employs over 6,000 people. The company's operations include two Texas refineries with a combined throughput capacity of over 205,000 barrels per day, over 2,000 branded gasoline stations and convenience stores in eight states in the southwestern U.S., and approximately 3,800 miles of petroleum pipelines. Other businesses include petrochemical processing, anhydrous ammonia and natural gas liquids storage, marketing and distribution.

Sybase, Inc., is a worldwide leader in client/server software. Sybase is focused in the four major client/server categories: databases, tools, database systems management and interoperability, providing desktop to enterprise scalability. The company's mission is to provide its customers with an open, adaptable information systems architecture that enables rapid business change. Headquartered in Emeryville, Calif., Sybase is the seventh largest independent software company in the world.

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Lawson is a registered trademark and Lawson Open Enterprise Solutions is a trademark of Lawson Software. Other company and product names are the trademarks of their respective companies.

CONTACT: Rogers Communications, Wakefield, Mass.

Jessica Solodar or Bruce Rogers, 617/224-1100

or

Lawson Software, Minneapolis

Jan Cusumano, 612/362-4748