IBM and Boole & Babbage Ink Multi-Million Dollar Licensing Agreement; Deal Grants IBM Rights for Extended Use of MainView Technology.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 15, 1996--Boole & Babbage, Inc. (NASDAQ: BOOL) today announced that it has finalized a long-term licensing agreement with IBM for extended use of the Boole & Babbage BBI(TM) base technology in the IBM CICSPlex System Manager (CPSM) product.

Under the terms of the contract, Boole & Babbage will receive CPSM royalty payments through March 1999 which are estimated to total $10 million. In return, IBM will obtain extended rights for continued use of the underlying BBI technology in future CPSM development projects and will assume all customer support and maintenance responsibilities for CPSM.

In 1991, IBM selected Boole & Babbage to build the initial release of CPSM on the BBI base technology due to its inherent architectural advantages. BBI provides the enabling architecture for CPSM to support many regions of CICS in new Parallel Sysplex environments with sophisticated capabilities such as single system image and single point-of-control. BBI, which is also the foundation of all Boole & Babbage MainView(TM) products, fully supports and exploits the new parallel processing environments as well as traditional mainframe systems.

In the large systems arena, CICS is the dominant transaction-processing system in the world and recognized as one of IBM's most strategic products. The licensing agreement for the BBI technology gives IBM flexibility in the way CPSM is licensed and distributed in the future. As IBM moves to broaden distribution of CPSM, Boole & Babbage stands to accelerate deployment of its product architecture to thousands of sites and receive a more predictable stream of royalty payments during the next three years.

"This agreement represents a tangible endorsement of the sysplex-enabling BBI architecture and we are pleased to receive IBM's further commitment to our advanced systems management technology," said Paul E. Newton, president and CEO of Boole & Babbage. "The market acceptance of CPSM as the de facto solution for managing large CICSplex environments underscores the benefits of the Boole & Babbage product architecture."

"By assuring the further propagation of the MainView technology throughout the market, this agreement is a gold-medal winner for Boole & Babbage," said David Floyer, director of research for large systems, International Data Corp. "The Boole & Babbage architecture provides some essential capabilities for systems management in Parallel Sysplex environments such as a CICSplex system. With the rapid take-up of CMOS and the steady user migration to parallel processor complexes, it makes sense from IBM's standpoint to exclusively control the development and distribution of CPSM."

Utilizing the MainView object-oriented technology, CPSM allows hundreds of CICS processing regions to be managed as a single system and can similarly manage any user-defined aggregation of workloads as a single application. This greatly simplifies the process of managing performance and identifying and resolving problems. As a CICS workload manager, CPSM automatically determines and routes individual transactions to the most efficient region available. All BBI-based products take advantage of a sophisticated window interface with point-and-shoot navigation for seamless integration from one commonly based product to another, including single-keystroke transition between all Boole & Babbage MainView products and between Boole & Babbage products and CPSM.

The Boole & Babbage MainView family of products provide large systems performance monitoring, management and automation and are an integral component of the Boole & Babbage Enterprise Automation suite. MainView products concurrently support Parallel Sysplex, OS/390 and traditional MVS environments, as well as multiple subsystem releases. MainView for MQSeries is the newest BBI-based solution for providing proactive performance management and automation of IBM's MQSeries messaging middleware.

Boole & Babbage is a leader in enterprise automation software for distributed systems. The Company is committed to supporting open systems and the growing client/server market to help IS organizations increase systems availability and reduce costs. Boole & Babbage maintains strategic alliances with other industry leaders to ensure its customers the most powerful, efficient solutions. Founded in 1967, Boole & Babbage sells more than 40 products in North America, Europe, Asia, Japan, Australia and Latin America. -0-

NOTE TO EDITORS: Boole & Babbage is a registered trademark of Boole & Babbage, Inc. MainView and BBI are trademarks of Boole & Babbage, Inc. IBM, MQSeries, CICS, CICSPlex System Manager, Parallel Sysplex and OS/390 are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

CONTACT: Boole & Babbage

Arthur F. Knapp, 408/526-3333 or [e-mail] (CFO)

Shelly Gordon, 408/526-3430 or [e-mail] (PR)

http://www.boole.com