NEON Systems Extends Its Leadership Position in Business Event Management - Delivers Real-Time Event Capture for Mainframe Native VSAM and Adabas Databases.

SUGAR LAND, Texas & DALLAS -- Shadow z/Events Allows Organizations to Use Mainframe Events to Increase Operational Efficiencies and Maintain Data Consistency

NEON(R) Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:NEON), The Mainframe Integration Experts, announced today at Forrester's GigaWorld IT Forum 2005, that it has extended its industry-leading mainframe business event management solution, Shadow(R) z/Events, to include capabilities for non-invasive capture, enrichment and publication of events occurring within Native VSAM(R) and Adabas(R) mainframe databases. With this announcement, Shadow z/Events now supports the broadest range of mainframe-based, real-time event sources in the market, including DB2(R), IMS(R)/DB, CICS(R) VSAM, Native VSAM and Adabas.

Mainframes are designed to handle high volumes of input/output or transactional computing workloads in a secure, mission critical manner. This specialized capability contributes to the prevalence of mainframes within vertical markets such as financial services/insurance, government and manufacturing. It is within these highly transactional computing environments where a majority of meaningful business events occur, and where real-time event technologies such as Shadow z/Events offer the biggest opportunities for improving data consistency and operational efficiencies.

Shadow z/Events, a key component of NEON's Shadow RTE mainframe integration suite, provides organizations that rely on mainframe systems with a single, common interface for managing the refinement, delivery and monitoring of business events across multiple mainframe datasources to multiple messaging protocols -- all within a zero-latency or real-time execution model.

Organizations like the 17th Judicial Circuit of Florida/Judicial Information Systems (JIS) Department have already begun to implement real-time event driven solutions. As one of the largest judiciaries in Florida, the 17th Judicial Circuit wanted to increase the efficiency of its judicial information management and case management system. Currently, most of its court information is stored on a mainframe system using CICS and VSAM. In order to make the information more readily available to its judiciary and courts administration personnel, JIS is creating a data warehouse populated by real-time information from Shadow z/Events deployed within the mainframe's VSAM data, DB2 juvenile data and DB2 court administration data.

"We had been wanting to do this for three and a half years, but did not have the case management infrastructure in place," said Les Pearson, systems and programming manager within the JIS Department of the 17th Judicial Circuit. "This system allows us to be one of the few large judiciaries in the country to give judicial personnel and case managers real-time access to case management information."

The 17th Circuit's judicial information system goes by the acronym BEAMIS, short for Business Efficiency And Management Information System. When fully operational, the new system will the basis for providing real-time case information to case managers throughout the 17th Judicial Circuit. The BEAMIS system will enhance the decision making process for the 17th Circuit judiciary and allow the Office of the Court Administrator to significantly improve the level of service being offered to its clients, specifically attorneys, plaintiffs, defendants and the general public.

"Maintaining data consistency as it flows between different applications and computing platforms is a key issue for organizations, and one that can effectively be addressed with real-time technologies like Shadow z/Events," said Robert Evelyn, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Solutions, at NEON Systems. "With the ability to capture and publish data changes as real-time XML events, organizations can now use and share current, accurate data throughout the enterprise for improved operational efficiency and competitive advantage."

Shadow z/Events provides a complete solution for business event management that allows developers to enrich, aggregate and transform technical events occurring within mainframe datasources into meaningful business events. The product provides non-invasive event capture capabilities for the broadest range of mainframe datasources, including two new databases -- Adabas and Native VSAM -- as well as DB2, IMS/DB and CICS VSAM. To facilitate broader utilization of mainframe events within initiatives like data integration and data warehousing or BPM, Business Intelligence and BAM initiatives, Shadow z/Events supports multiple event distribution and messaging protocols for WebSphere MQ, Tibco Rendezvous, J2CA 1.5, as well as HTTP.

Key Features of Shadow z/Events

--  Non-invasive
    Event "listeners" require no changes to the mainframe application
    code and are uniquely tailored to the mainframe subsystem to
    optimize performance and minimize resource utilization

--  Real-time
    Operates in real-time, reducing latency and the expense associated
    with traditional batch processing or journal based capture

--  Eliminates Polling Routine
    Replaces CPU-intensive and inaccurate polling routines used to
    detect state changes

--  Development Studio/IDE
    Shadow Studio (Eclipse) allows developers to easily create rules
    and model profiles of key mainframe business events against their
    target destinations

--  Support for J2CA 1.5 inbound communications
    Enables inbound communications for Enterprise Information Systems
    (EIS), allowing automated delivery and integration of selected
    events into heterogeneous business processes

--  Transactional integrity
    Events are detected and embedded within the application Unit of
    Work, never processed until the Unit of Work has been committed

--  Event enrichment
    Tagged events can be enriched to include contextual information
    and event details, transforming an innocuous technical state
    change into an event with increased business meaning

--  Transformation
    Captured mainframe events are transformed into XML to facilitate
    utilization with a broad range of distributed application
    environments and databases

--  Real-time data synchronization
    Enables data consistency among distributed instances of the same
    information, by allowing the mainframe system of record to
    automate a real-time distributed synchronization process

About Shadow RTE

NEON's Shadow RTE technology provides a robust technical architecture to support the broad range of customer requirements for mainframe integration. Shadow RTE is the foundation upon which customers can integrate mission critical mainframe resources into a Real-time Enterprise. A single unified platform, Shadow RTE enables real-time mainframe integration with industry standard application development platforms -- .NET and/or J2EE -in support of Web services for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), real-time events for Event-Driven Architectures (EDA), SQL for direct data access and transactional (XA) support, and Presentation integration for Web-enablement of legacy screen-based applications and data. Shadow RTE provides the auditing, tracing and logging layer required to meet new compliance reporting. With Shadow RTE, customers have a mainframe integration infrastructure that at its lower levels is designed and proven to be secure, scalable, high performance, reliable and manageable.

About NEON Systems

NEON Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:NEON) -- the Mainframe Integration Experts -- is a leading provider of enterprise-class mainframe integration solutions, delivering the only unified mainframe integration platform to support the entire range of requirements for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event-Driven Architectures (EDA) -- key requirements to underpin the Real-time Enterprise. NEON's Shadow technology is designed to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration allowing large organizations with significant commitment to mainframe systems to streamline incumbent technologies and lower total cost of ownership. NEON's Shadow z/Services and Shadow z/Events offerings attack the emerging mainframe Web services and real-time mainframe event-driven markets and are unique in their depth and breadth of support for the requirements of such markets. With extensive mainframe integration expertise, NEON is uniquely qualified to solve the complexities of supporting new business initiatives that must integrate with critical mainframe systems. For more information on the Powering the Real-time Enterprise, see our website at http://www.neonsys.com or call 800-505-NEON.

The NEON logo, Shadow, Shadow Web Server and Shadow Direct are registered trademarks, and Shadow z/Services, Shadow z/Events, and Shadow Studio are trademarks of NEON Systems, Inc. in the USA and in other select countries. All other trademarks, service marks and product or service names are the property of their respective owners.