New MERANT DataDirect Technology Improves Oracle Application Performance By Up To 500%; DataDirect Announces First and Only Wire Protocol ODBC Driver for Oracle.

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 2, 2001

MERANT (NNM:MRNT; LSE:MRN) DataDirect, the leader in standards-based data connectivity solutions embedded in hundreds of commercial applications and used by more than 4.5 million end users, today announced a new, innovative Wire Protocol Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver for Oracle. Comparative benchmark results indicate that DataDirect's new Wire Protocol driver for Oracle is up to five times faster than competitive ODBC drivers, enabling customers to greatly optimize connectivity between their enterprise applications and Oracle databases.

The new Wire Protocol Oracle driver - an innovative ODBC driver architecture only available from DataDirect - communicates with Oracle databases via Oracle's wire-protocol layer, bypassing Oracle's client library, Net8. As a result, customers can drastically increase the performance of their Oracle applications and greatly reduce administration and support costs. The Wire Protocol ODBC driver is available as part of DataDirect's Connect ODBC 4.0 product, which was just announced today. Connect ODBC 4.0 is a suite of Wire Protocol drivers providing Wire-level data connectivity to Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase and Informix.

"With this announcement, DataDirect has delivered the most innovative connectivity solution for Oracle, far-surpassing any other connectivity method and dramatically improving the performance of Oracle applications," said Evan McDonnell, vice president of product management for DataDirect. "DataDirect's core competency is data connectivity. This product announcement underscores DataDirect's ability to deliver breakthrough solutions that make an immediate impact on our customer's productivity. We will continue to `push the envelope' across all data access standards including ODBC, JDBC, ADO, and .NET, to help our customers continuously be one step ahead of the competition."

A true test of DataDirect's outstanding performance with Connect ODBC 4.0 and its Oracle Wire Protocol driver is that several customers have thoroughly tested and benchmarked the product in their own environments.

"We're excited about DataDirect's new Wire Protocol Oracle driver, which will give our Oracle customers 'out of the box' connectivity with MicroStrategy 7(TM)," said Samuel San, Labs Systems Engineering Manager at MicroStrategy(R) Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR). "Once DataDirect's Wire Protocol Oracle driver is incorporated into our platform, our customers will be able to run the MicroStrategy 7 installation and instantly connect with Oracle, without having to configure Net8. DataDirect's latest Wire Protocol Oracle driver will simplify the configuration and potential debugging process for our customers and hopefully enable MicroStrategy to reduce required support resources."

"I am truly impressed! We achieved true 'out-of-the-box' database connectivity with DataDirect's Wire Protocol ODBC drivers, which eliminated the need to use Oracle's Net8 or any other database client libraries," said Randy Lynn Tusch, Middleware Specialist with Duke Energy, Corp. "We conducted many successful tests using DataDirect's new Wire Protocol driver for Oracle, and immediately realized several benefits it could provide. The two most significant areas that were immediately obvious were the ease of administration and increased performance, which translates into lower maintenance costs and improved customer service."

Based on the ODBC 3.5 specification, DataDirect's Wire Protocol ODBC driver for Oracle supports Oracle 8 and 9i databases. The product supports Oracle's internationalization features, including Unicode, returning multiple result sets in PL/SQL, and extended data types including BLOBs and CLOBs. The product is available immediately from DataDirect by calling 800-876-3101 or visiting www.merant.com/datadirect. About DataDirect

MERANT DataDirect is the industry leader in data connectivity, dedicated to the J2EE, JDBC and ODBC standards. Exclusive partnerships with Sun, Microsoft, IBM and leading database vendors enable DataDirect to offer the industry's best components for data connectivity. That's why more than 4.5 million users and hundreds of software vendors choose DataDirect when they need to access data--whether for a single project, a commercial application, or as part of the enterprise-wide infrastructure for mission-critical data. DataDirect helps anyone who wants to bring applications to market faster and have them perform without worry--no matter what the standard, platform or database.

MERANT and DataDirect are trademarks, of MERANT. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.