MERANT Works With IBM to Provide Customers With High-Performance Development Platform; MERANT Products Now Available for IBM's AIX 5L On IBM Power and Intel IA-64 Architectures.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 16, 2000

MERANT (NNM:MRNT; LSE:MRN), a leading global e-business software solutions company, today announced a technology partnership with IBM, whereby MERANT's Server Express, a product in MERANT's Egility solutions suite, will be ported to IBM's AIX 5L UNIX operating system to support both the IBM Power and the Intel IA-64 bit architectures. Under this agreement, MERANT's Egility solutions will enable customers to utilize this powerful new development platform for enterprise and e-business applications.

"MERANT's Server Express is an important development tool for many new and existing applications," said Tilak Agerwala, vice president of UNIX marketing and product management for IBM. "Our customers will be delighted with the increased flexibility as they will have to place their applications on new, cost-effective server platforms when Server Express becomes available for AIX 5L on both the IBM Power and the Intel IA-64 platforms."

"This partnership, which includes funding from IBM, demonstrates MERANT's leadership and commitment to supporting key customer platforms in this rapidly emerging e-business environment," said Tony Hill, senior vice president and general manager of MERANT. "IBM's AIX 5L Operating System is a cutting edge environment, and by leveraging our solutions for this platform, customers will now have a clear business advantage over the competition in their market spaces."

MERANT's Traditional Development, Legacy Extension and Legacy Integration solutions are all supported through this agreement. These solutions enable enterprises to extend their legacy assets to the Web, integrate their newly developed Web presence with their existing systems, and provide a highly productive and robust enterprise application development environment for mission-critical applications including e-business.

AIX 5L on IA-64 incorporates technologies from IBM's AIX, DYNIX/ptx and SCO UnixWare. AIX 5L is designed to run on servers built around IBM's Power and Intel's IA-64 and architectures. IBM, and other manufacturers, will offer customers a choice of servers capable of running AIX 5L, allowing them to take advantage of the industry's strongest UNIX operating system on both the Power and IA-64 platform. With MERANT's Server Express on AIX 5L, customers will be able to build new applications and migrate existing enterprise applications to the proven POWER architecture or to the emerging IA-64 platform.

Today's announcement underscores MERANT's recent award as a premier member of IBM's global PartnerWorld Developer's program.

About MERANT

MERANT is a leading global e-business software solutions company. Founded in 1976, MERANT has approximately $360 million in annual revenues, 2,000 employees and more than 500 technology partners. More than 5 million professionals use MERANT technology solutions at 35,000 customer sites, including the entire Fortune 100, the majority of the Global 500 and over 400 leading dotcoms. MERANT uses its Egility framework, a comprehensive set of solutions combining expertise, market-leading technology, best practices and an extensive network of partners, to deliver an e-business applications infrastructure. MERANT can also create comprehensive Internet applications that include creative design and application development all built upon the Egility framework. For additional information, visit www.merant.com.

MERANT, Egility and ServerExpress are trademarks of MERANT. AIX is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.