Open Applications Group Names Newest Board Member.

ATLANTA -- The Open Applications Group (OAGi) announced today the appointment of Ralph Hertlein, Global Industry Standards Leader for IBM Corporation, as the newest member of its Board of Directors. Hertlein will begin his term as vice chairmen of OAGi's Membership Committee when the board convenes today in San Francisco.

OAGi is one of the world's leading not-for-profit open standards groups, with a mission to build business-language standards that ensure application interoperability within and between business enterprises and across industries around the world. The growing adoption of its OAGIS Standard helps to address the global need for a common business language and increasingly enables diverse business applications to communicate more effectively.

"We welcome Ralph to our Board of Directors, and we are excited with IBM's increased investment in OAGi and the principles the organization stands for," said David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group. "As an industry leader, IBM is in a special position to drive open-standards solutions to save time and money for enterprises worldwide, and also to drive further convergence among standards to simplify those solutions."

Hertlein comes to OAGi with more than 10 years experience with IBM in the areas of standards, integration, business process development and market management. Prior to joining IBM, he assisted Bell South in developing internet product and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) with management consulting as well as product design, development and manufacturing. Hertlein was one of the first to create a fully integrated product-development process and currently has three patents pending.

"Ralph's participation on the OAGi Board of Directors will help to achieve the goals IBM shares with one of the world's most respected standards organizations: namely, leveraging the power of open standards to accelerate the evolution of all industries towards service-oriented architecture (SOA)," said Dr. Robert Sutor, IBM Vice President for Standards and Open Source. "It's clear that open standards like OAGIS and ODF are fast becoming the cornerstones of such efforts."

The Open Applications Group, Inc. (OAGi) is a not-for-profit open standards group building process-based XML standards for both B2B and A2A integration. The Open Applications Group was formed in late 1994 as the first post-EDI organization focusing on improving the state of application integration and enterprise interoperability.

For more information visit their web site at: www.openapplications.org